What is RAID? Advantages of RAID Disadvantages of RAID Different Types of RAID Configurations RAID 0 (Striped) RAID 1 (Mirrored) Drivers Creating a Driver Disk 4 2.2 Installing Drivers Installing Hard Disks Creating a RAID Array Using the RAID Configuration Utility 5 4.2 Creating Arrays Automatically Creating Arrays Manually Creating RAID 0 Creating RAID 1 Rebuilding a RAID 1 Array Deleting ArraysUsing your RAID Drive Partitioning and Formatting Under Windows XP 10Installing an OS on a RAID Drive Installing Windows 98/ME Installing Windows 2000/XP Using Hard Drives as Non-RAID Disadvantages of RAID Using many drives has a disadvantage.

The probability of a single drive failing out of many drives is much higher than that of one failing out of only one. This results in a greater chance of losing the information on your disks. There are ways however, to minimize this effect, even making it more reliable than using single disks. 1.3 Different Types of RAID Configurations There are many different ways in which RAID can be configured, each with its set of advantages and disadvantages. The Silicon Image® controller supports the RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations. 1.3.1 RAID 0 (Striped) RAID 0 works by breaking down data and spreading it over multiple disk drives. RAID 0 does not protect data from failure, and due to the way it stores data, a fault on one drive would result in failure of the entire array. It does however, have vast improvements in both reading and writing speeds, with the theoretical speed proportional to the number of disks used in the array. It is also fairly efficient in using disk space, with its size is equal to the size of the smallest disk multiplied by the number of disks. 1.3.2 RAID 1 (Mirrored) RAID 1 works by maintaining an identical copy of the data of one drive on another. If either of these drives should fail, no information is lost as the second drive will always contain an identical copy of the other. A RAID 1 system can be recovered by simply replacing the damaged disk and mirroring the data on the new drive.

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