Originally Posted by popeye67

When you use your computer it reads and writes information on the hard drive, the quicker the computer can read and write that information the faster it will be,

with raid0 the computer has two drives to read and write to simultaniously which means theres a performance increase, drawbacks are cost (you need to buy another drive), if one drive fails you lose all the information on both drives, performance there is an improvment in performace but its not a marked improvment you can see with the naked eye, the gain is minimal and not really worth all the arseing around.

raid1 reads and writes simultaniously to both drives but its the same information, bit like backing up your entire hard drive as you go, if one hard drive suffers a complete failure all your info and the operating system is still intact on the other drive, drawbacks price still need two of em, hard drive failures tend not to be complete they tend to go bad over time, if one drive goes there no guarentee the other drive hasnt already gone, the only time you will find out is when you really need it, there are ways round this useing raid parity but its even more complicated and more expensive cos you need even more drives and finally i havent got a clue how its done so your on yor own,

most modern motherboards support raid, is it worth setting a raid array - probably not, is it worth learning how to set up a raid array - its either that or the ironing.