RAID Options: 0, 1, 0+1, or 5

A RAID array is two or more hard drives working together to either increase performance, redundancy, or both. As a gamer, you really don't need a RAID array, since the benefits don't usually outweigh the drawbacks. Nevertheless, here are your options:

1. RAID 0 - requires two identical hard drives. (Also known as "striping", and no not like in Vegas - that's spelled differently.) This is where two hard drives share the burden of reading and writing data in order to speed things up. How much does this speed things up for gamers? Not a whole lot. Level and zone loading and quick saves/quick loads will go faster. The downside is, if either drive crashes for whatever reason, you lose all the data on both drives. Consequently, never keep anything you can't lose on a RAID 0 array. The size of your usable hard drive space in a RAID 0 array is the size of both hard drives added together (about 600GB with two 300GB drives.) If you decide to go with RAID 0, we recommend doing so with a pair of Velociraptor drives and a third 500GB or 1TB data drive.

2. RAID 1 - requires two identical hard drives. (Also known as "mirroring".) This is where the PC is constantly writing data to two drives at the same time, effectively maintaining a duplicate copy of all your data which is constantly being updated. This reduces performance in order to protect you from data loss in the event of a hard drive crashing. Note that RAID 1 does not protect you from accidentally deleting something. If you trash a file yourself, it's instantly gone from the backup too. The size of your usable hard drive space in a RAID 1 array is the size of one of the hard drives (about 300GB with two 300GB drives.)

3. RAID 0+1 - requires four identical hard drives. In this configuration, the PC creates a RAID 0 array with two hard drives to increase speed, but also mirrors that array to a second RAID 0 array which it constantly keeps updated. In effect, you get some of the speed gain of RAID 0 in addition to the redundancy of RAID 1. In some cases (not all) RAID 0+1 can survive the loss of two hard drives at the same time. The size of your usable hard drive space in a RAID 0+1 array is the size of two hard drives added together (about 600GB with four 300GB drives.)

4. RAID 5 - requires four identical drives. (Technically possible with three drives, but not recommended.) RAID 5 is another blending of speed gain with redundancy. It is slower than RAID 0+1, and less redundant, since only one drive can ever fail at a time without data loss. The primary advantage to RAID 5 is that as more hard drives are added to the array, a higher percentage of total disk space is available for use. This only really starts to become attractive when you hit five or six drives, which is why RAID 5 is mostly used as a server solution. Consequently, we don't recommend RAID 5 for a gaming rig.

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