Questions about pc stuff

RAID is a way of organizing how hard drives are written to. RAID 0 nets you a speed gain by divvying up info between two hard drives. Basically, this works because you'll have two hard drives putting together chunks of info at the same time, compared to one hard drive tasked with putting together the same chunks of info. RAID 1 is simple, you just clone whatever happens to the main drive to the second drive. By doing this, you lose the size of one drive, however, if one drive ever fails, the other one will back it up. Drive lifetimes are getting longer though, so RAID 0 is more common now. RAID 5, eh, I really don't know an easy way of explaining it. You need 3 or more hard drives, and it gives you a small boost while having a failsafe similar to RAID 1. RAID 0+1 or RAID 1+0 really have no difference. It's exactly what it seems. RAID 0 + RAID 1 or the other way around. RAID 0 + RAID 1 is just having one RAID 0 set, then using RAID 1'ing that set. So you need at least 4 hard drives, with the number of drives divisible by 2.

Blagh, that was too complicated, right? Lemme explain it with an analogy. Pretend that there's a guy stacking boxes. The boxes are your data, and the guy stacking them is your hard drive. A regular HDD is just one guy stacking a pile of boxes. RAID 0, think of it like two guys stacking one single stack of boxes together. Should go faster than just one guy stacking the same stack, right? RAID 1, think of it like two guys stacking two identical stacks of boxes. RAID 0 + 1 or RAID 1 + 0, think of it like two guys stacking one pile of boxes, and another two guys making another stack exactly like the stack the first pair of guys is making.

SSD's, well, you can technically just store all your info on an SSD. However, since they're so expensive per gigabyte, people just prefer to stick Windows on a small, cheaper SSD, and store data on another normal HDD. The second advantage of this is that HDDs and SSDs slow down after reaching about 50% size used. If the OS and data coexisted on one drive, once that drive hit 50% usage, both would slow down. Keeping the OS separate means that if the data drive exceeded 50% usage, your OS wouldn't be affected.

Thar ya go. Any more questions? :D

Edited by ablahblah - 27 Jun 2010 at 10:23pm