RAID 0 is also know as "disk stripping". It requires at least two physical drives, and consists of spreading data across both disks. Once two or more drives are configured to operate in RAID 0 mode, the system recognizes them as being a single, unique drive with a total capacity equal to the sum of constituents. Thus, if you stripe two 30GB drives, the system sees them as a single 60GB drive.
When the system is ready to write data to disk, the RAID controller will begin by loading the incoming information onto the first drive's data buffer until it is full. Once that is done, rather than waiting for the drive to empty its buffer onto disk -- as would a conventional IDE controller, the RAID controller will begin loading data onto the second drive's data buffer, and so on. By doing this, the system isn't required to wait as long while data is inscribed. Overall write-times and read-times are nearly doubled in speed, because the system isn't depending on the performance of a single data buffer.
The only problem with RAID 0 is that it includes absolutely no data security to speak of. Because of the way that information is spread across the drives, if one dies, the information on both disks is lost for good.
RAID 1
RAID 1 ("mirroring") differs from RAID 0 in that data is not simply spread-out across multiple drives, but rather duplicated. Thus, any information that is written to one drive is also copied on another. So, is two 30GB drives are used in RAID 1 mode, the total available space available will be 30GB. This technique inherently requires twice as much time to write data, because of the fact that it must be copied to two physical drives. On the other hand, read time is cut in half, because the same data can be read into the buffers of two separate drives before being read-out.
RAID 1 offers great data security by the very nature of the fact that two copies of all data are kept at all times. So, if one drive dies, work can continue as normal, because all the necessary data is still available on the remaining disk.
Creation of a RAID drive.
With the RocketRAID 1520, creating a RAID 0 or 1 set-up is child's play. All that the user is required to do is hit "CTRL + H" while the system is detecting the drives that are hooked-up to the RAID controller, in order to drop into its BIOS system. Once there, a menu system provides the options to create a disk network, designate which disks will be part of the network, add or remove disks, erase disks, etc...
To create a disk network, it suffices to simply connect the necessary drives to the RAID controller, boot the computer, drop into the controller's BIOS, and set-up the type of network that is desired. Once that's done, simply reboot with a start-up diskette equipped with fdisk in order to partition the network drive. Once that's done, it's simple matter of formatting the drive, and installing your data.
