Raid

[ace84]

Does anybody know if raid improve the reliability of disk I/O operations??

[Armo]

depending on what type of raid your set up, yes

there are diffrent 'levels' of RAID

Raid 0 - (striping) all out speed, no frills no bells, and NO data redundacey, if one drive falls from the array, everything is lost

Raid 1 - (mirroring) used for a see through data backup. what ever goes on one drive, a copy is put on the other drive. when one drive dies or falls from the array, the other picks right up and keeps on trucking without any loss of data or hesitation

Raid 3 - sector level striping, not used very much

Raid 5 - (striping with parity) used very much in big servers file servers and servers that need 0% downtime. its minimum number of 3 disks for the array. it stripes data accross the drives, then then using a set of algorithms creates a parity bit that is copied to the next step drive. if a drive failes the computer can look at the paritybit and determine what information was on the drive that died.

Raid 6 - (striping with dual parity) same as raid 5 but it can allow 2 drives to fail from the array at the same time. we are talking some serious equipment for this.

Raid 10 - mirrored raid 0 arrays

Raid 50 - mirrored raid 5 arrays

[hats]

yes it does depend on what you are trying to accomplish.
raid is highly unessasary though for a home user, even most power users (unless they are archiving there 1TB music collection for the long haul)
becouse raid does have some drawbacks.
if you hard drive has failed on you before due to some clicking noise and you just cant boot from it I would sugest throwing your drive into a USB caddy and ataching it to another computer, there is still a great chance you can pull the data directly off of that funk'd drive

[Riptide]

Question, can someone who has RAID 0 just add in a 3rd identical HD, and set it up for RAID 5? Or would I have to do a completely new install?