Gaming Raid 1 and Raid 1 confusion

[nonnonnon]

Hi! I am planning in buying this SSD. I will use that and the hard disk i got now together, having documents, film, and music on the hard disk, and dualboot kubuntu 10.10 and windows vista on the SSD. I was just wondering what Raid is, wich Raid i should use, and why. Thank you for any answers

 

[Scorpei]

lmgtfy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

 

[Fat D]

RAID = redundant array of independant drives. Basically, it means you throw in a bunch of disks and configure them in a certain RAID, and all this results in a single huge disk. There are various varieties, for example you can throw away half the capacity to improve read speeds and redundancy, or, with RAID 5, waste a single drive worth of space in order to be on the safe side if a single one fails. However, it will always slow down writing speed.

For your purposes, I think it is best not to worry about RAIDs and keep the SSD and the HDD as seperate entities.

 

[Originality]

Word of warning, that SSD will not boot an OS. EDIT: To explain, PCI-e SSD drives currently do not allow any OS to boot from them. They can only be used as high-speed storage for the time being. In the future, BIOS may provide support for PCI-e booting, but for now it doesn't. If you want to boot an OS, it either has to be via IDE/SATA (HDD, SSD or ODD), or USB (although I've yet to get a USB boot OS working in my experiments). EDIT2: After doing some research into it, I've found that you actually can install an OS onto it (it's not plug-n-play so you'll need to load additional drivers before the installation), however I've read many reports of it being unstable afterwards with BSoDs appearing regularly. It might just be with a few defective products, but I've seen enough over various forums to be skeptical that it's any better than a Crucial C300 120GB drive.

Simplified description of RAID: an array of drives set up to write data to each drive at the same time.
RAID 0 = sharing the data across each drive. Provides additional performance and capacity, but if one drive dies, all the data is lost.
RAID 1 = mirroring the data from one drive to the next. Doesn't affect performance at all, and you gain no extra capacity from the extra drive, but if one drive fails, you lose no data so long as the other drive still works. In other words, using a backup drive.

 

[nonnonnon]

Thank you for all the answers! One more question: Anyone knows if Linux (Kubuntu) works with this?