When you buy your PC at a big-box or office supplies store, you generally get one with a single hard disk. In many cases, that’s fine, especially given the huge capacities that are now available. But there are advantages to having multiple drives. One is obviously more storage. But an even more important reason is that it provides you with the opportunity to use RAID.
RAID, which stands for redundant array of individual disks, is widely used on network servers. It uses a special disk controller that’s available on most PC motherboards, and you can create a RAID array inside a desktop if it has room for more than one hard disk drive.
When you see the term RAID being used, it’s almost always with a number, such as RAID 0, RAID 1, or RAID Level 5 (or other numbers). The level tells you how the disk drives in the array are configured.
For example, RAID 0, or RAID Level 0, consists of two or more drives configured as a single drive. In this configuration, data is written to a section on the first drive, then the next bunch of data is written to the second drive, and back and forth. RAID 0 is also called striping, as stripes of data are written alternately back and forth between the two drives. For example, let’s say you have two 4TB hard drives that you configure in RAID 0. The computer sees those two drives as a single 8TB drive. RAID 0 gives you the opportunity to build very large drives, but if one of the drives fails, you lose all the data on both drives.
RAID 1 is a configuration called mirroring, and it is designed to provide data backup. It consists of two hard disks of the same size. When something is written or changed on the first drive, it’s written or changed exactly the same way on the second drive. So the second drive is a mirror image of the first, and if one of the drives fails, the data remains secure on the other.
There are other RAID configurations, and also combinations of RAID configurations, such as RAID 0+1 (these are called nested arrays).
If you don’t have room in your PC to construct an internal RAID array, consider adding an external storage device such as a network-attached storage that can be configured as a RAID device.
The biggest benefit of using RAID isn’t that you can construct huge virtual disk drives (although you can stripe across multiple drives), but that using one of the configurations preserves data in case of a hard drive failure. Think of it as a built-in backup. And while hard drives are pretty reliable, sooner or later there’s a real chance you will have one fail.
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