Hello jah711,
To answer your first question:
RAID is was first only used in server systems and powerfull workstations,
but now RAID is available to the home user for a while and implemented on
many mainboards as standard. RAID is ment or for speed or safety or both.
RAID what means 'Redundant Array of Independent Disks' is a collection of 2
or more disks working together in an array. There are diffrent
implementations of RAID known as RAID Levels.
Examples:
RAID Level 0: Provides block 'striping' (striping means the storing of a
sequential block of incoming data across multiple SCSI/ATA/SATA devices)
Level 0 yields higher performance than is posible with a sigle drive, but it
does not provice any 'redundancy' (thus if one of the devices in the stripe
set fails the complete stripe set is destroyed, not verry safe...)
RAID Level 1: The drives are paired and Mirrored. All data is 100 percent
duplicated on a drive of the same size. This is much safer, but you loose
half of the total available space becouse of the mirror, if one of the 2
drives in a mirror fails you dont loose any data.
RAID Level 3: Data is 'striped' across several physical drives. Maintains
parity information wich can be used for data recovery. Safe, but takes up a
fair amount of space for the redundancy.
RAID Level 5: Data is 'striped' across several physical drives. For data
redundancy, the drives are encoded with rotated XOR redundancy. Safe and
costs less space than level 3.
RAID Level 0+1: Combines RAID 0 striping and RAID 1 mirroring. This level
provides redundancy through mirroring and is fast becouse of the striping,
but it'l cost you half of your total disk space...
RAID JBOD: Just a bunch of drives, each drive is operated independently like
a normal disk controller, or can be spanned and used as a sigle drive, does
not provide redundancy or speed inprovements...
The RAID levels found in modern home computers can be: level 0, 1, 0+1 and
JBOD. Level 5 and level 3 are mostly used in server systems, becouse of its
redundancy. there are however controller cards available for home systems
that support level 5. the RAID levels below are only used in larger server
systems and NAS/SAN solutions.
RAID Level 10: Combines RAID 0 sriping and RAID 1 mirroring spanned across
multiple drive groups (super drive group, as in multiple little groups in
one big group). This level redundancy through mirroring and better
performance than level 1 alone.
RAID Level 30: data is striped across multiple drive groups (super drive
group). Maintains parity information, wich can be used for data recovery.
RAID Level 50: Data is striped across multiple drive groups (super drive
group). For data redundancy, the drives are encoded with rotated XOR
redundancy.
The RAID controller creates the actual RAID level, the os only uses it.
Ok hope this answers your first question...
A good place to find your RAID drivers would be on the website from the
manufacturer of your RAID controller.
Or on the website of your mainboard manufacturer, sometimes the raid
controller is intergrated in the chipset of the mainboard, in that case you
can also look for the chipset manufacturer. (like VIA, nForce, Intel, Ali,
SiS etc...)
Hope that answers your second question.
Gr, Koen.
