09-01-2006, 07:55 PM
I've found that Wikipedia has a very thorough description of RAID. For most home/small office use RAID 0,1 and 5 are probably most common. RAID 0 gives performance, but actually decreases the reliability because if one drive failes you're screwed (remember those Lacie BigDisks?). RAID 1 is simply mirroring. You are limitted to the size of the smallest disk in the array. RAID 5 is going to be expensive because of the number of drives, but it gives redundancy and reliability. You can still function with a single bad drive and it can be rebuilt on-the-fly if all fo the pieces are hot-swappable. If you lose 2 drives you're screwed though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
RAID 0
A RAID 0 (also known as a stripe set) splits data evenly across two or more disks with no parity information for redundancy.
RAID 1
A RAID 1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on two or more disks. This is useful when read performance is more important than data capacity. Such an array can only be as big as the smallest member disk. A classic RAID 1 mirrored pair contains two disks, which increases reliability exponentially over a single disk.
RAID 5
A RAID 5 uses block-level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks. RAID 5 has achieved popularity due to its low cost of redundancy. Generally, RAID 5 is implemented with hardware support for parity calculations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
RAID 0
A RAID 0 (also known as a stripe set) splits data evenly across two or more disks with no parity information for redundancy.
RAID 1
A RAID 1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on two or more disks. This is useful when read performance is more important than data capacity. Such an array can only be as big as the smallest member disk. A classic RAID 1 mirrored pair contains two disks, which increases reliability exponentially over a single disk.
RAID 5
A RAID 5 uses block-level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks. RAID 5 has achieved popularity due to its low cost of redundancy. Generally, RAID 5 is implemented with hardware support for parity calculations.