RAID Options

If you wish, you may choose to have this Quiet PC set up with RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). RAID appears to the operating system as a single logical hard disk. However, RAID uses two or more hard drives in order to improve performance and/or provide fault tolerance (reduce chances of data loss). Every system we sell, which has an option for RAID, uses hardware RAID controllers. This hardware based RAID offers superior performance to software RAID. If you wish to take advantage of one of the following RAID options, you will need to choose a second hard drive when selecting your PC's custom configuration.
 

RAID 0 - Striping

RAID 0 provides data striping, which improves disk performance. RAID 0 splits ups data into blocks written across hard drives in an array. RAID 0 not only improves performance, but also allows the user to use the full data storage of all disks. This means if you choose two 160 Gig hard drives, you have access to 320 Gigs of hard drive storage. RAID 0, however, does NOT provide redundancy. Striping does not provide for any back up of your data. If you are interested in RAID as a means of backing up your data, please see RAID 1.
 

RAID 1 - Mirroring

RAID 1 is primarily used for redundancy (as a means of automatically backing up data). RAID 1 also provides greater read rates when compared to a single disk, but does not improve and sometimes slightly hinders the writing performance of the disk system. Mirroring (RAID 1) allows the user to easily rebuild the hard drive in the case that one drive fails. With RAID 1, the user cannot use the full disk storage of both disks. Instead, since the data is being written to two places (two disks) simultaneously, only half of the space is available for primary data storage. In other words, if you choose to use two 120 Gig hard drives for RAID 1, your system will only have 120 Gig of hard disk space available.