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RAID level- 0, which is also called Disk striping w/o parity, is the fastest drive array you can have, requires at least two disks, but does not provide fault tolerance. The data in this array gets written across a stripe, or different disks for a faster transfer. For instance, a 100 Meg file can be broken into 64kb chunks and split into three different disks –so that each disk is writing 64 kb of the file until the 100 meg is reached. This makes the whole process of data transfer faster because you have more that one disk reading/or writing at the same time.

RAID level- 1 also called disk mirroring uses(2) duplicate hard drives and replicates all data between them. This is the slowest form of fault tolerance because the data has to be replicated onto two disks at the same time. It also uses a more system overhead than RAID 0, but it does provide the quickest access to the system if one drive should fail.

RAID level 1/0 This RAID combines the best of both worlds. It takes a Disk stripe using two disks, and mirrors it to another set of disks for fault tolerance. So you will have the benefit of speed, and data protection! But this comes at a price –having to buy four drives isn’t very cost efficient, and makes this option not very popular when compared to the Stripe set with Parity –which is slightly slower but utilizes less disk space.

RAID level- 5 uses at least 3 disks and replicates data and parity information to different areas of each disk - it’s the fastest form of fault tolerance, but it’s expensive and requires more system overhead than all the others. It also uses space equivalent to one disk on the stripe set for parity information, but that’s a small price to pay for fast data protection, especially in critical setups like corporate servers. At the present time, this is not applicable to IDE RAID cards.

SCSI hard drives were generally the most popular choice for these kinds of configurations because of speed, and physical drive chaining abilities. But as many of you know, SCSI configurations are expensive, and people with a smaller budgets are sometimes forced to use IDE drives instead, and before the advent of IDE RAID cards, that solution used to impose some serious performance penalties on their machines!