RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks)

Many motherboards, these days, come with extra onboard IDE controllers. You may just connect additional IDE devices to them or you can implement a RAID pair on them. See the motherboard picture for the optional RAID connector. With RAID 0, you can mimick two identical hard disks as a single hard disk. This way, read and write operations would be distributed over 2 hard disks resulting in improved performance. To implement RAID-0, you have to attach preferably two identical hard disks (same model, brand, and capacity) to the connectors using two 80-pin cables. You may have to do some tweaking with drivers and BIOS updates before you can then treat the RAID pair as a single hard disk. Since the data being written is split between two hard disks, data in one of the hard disks is useless without the other. If one of them fails, all data is lost. RAID-0 should be attempted only if it is supported by the PC manufacturer. Most users use the extra IDE connectors for expansion rather than for RAID-0.

While RAID-0 is known as data striping, RAID-1 is known as data mirroring. In RAID-1, data being written on one hard disk is simultaneously copied to another hard disk. If one hard disk suffers a mechanical failure, your data will remain intact on the other hard disk.

RAID levels range from 0 through 5. There is one another level of RAID known as RAID 10, which is a combination of RAID 1 and RAID 0, and it is the best in terms of performance and redundancy.