RAID 0 and 1?
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN...
QCan you help me understand RAID? Some new PCS seem to come with RAID while others don’t, and those that do appear to offer a choice of RAID 0 or RAID 1 drives. I’m sure all this means something to the clever people who make the computers, but I really don’t know what to make of it.
ARAID stands for a redundant array of independent disks. That sounds complicated, but it merely describes different ways of exploiting the space on two or more drives.
For example, if you buy a PC with a couple of hard drives, then traditionally those two drives would operate independently of one another. In Windows 10, they’d typically be labelled as drive C and drive D.
However, with RAID it’s possible to set up drives to operate together and in various different ways. This is what the RAID numbers (technically known as ‘levels’) define. There are lots of different RAID levels, but for most home users the only two that matter are RAID 0 and 1.
With RAID 0, the storage of both drives can be pooled to become one larger ‘logical’ drive. So, even if the PC had, say, two physical 1TB hard drives, in Windows all you’d ‘see’ would be a single logical drive of 2TB – drive C, in our example. As both drives work in unison to open or save information, this may also boost performance a little.
RAID 1, by contrast, configures the second drive to provide ‘redundancy’. This means it precisely mirrors the contents of the first.
The 2TB capacity of the two physical drives become a 1TB logical drive (again, drive C in our example). The benefit is that if one drive develops a fault, then the other is immediately ready to keep things going.
The RAID level might be a pre-delivery choice for a new PC, but RAID is also a popular way to configure network-attached storage (NAS) devices, such as the pictured Terramaster D2-310 enclosure (around £140, www.snipca.com/37230) – because it eases the management of multiple drives.
Want to know the difference between technical terms? Email noproblem@ computeractive.co.uk