710XL RAID Systems

I am expecting a 710XL Home Office system next week. The system has
two 250GB hard drives for a total of 500GB. It is not clear to me
from the website if they are shipped as one RAID 0 configuration. The
description says RAID 0 performance (?).

My understanding of RAID 0 is that the data is striped across the two
250GB drives. With RAID 0, there is no redundancy. So, if one drive
should fail, I'd loose all data. If it were RAID 1, there would be
redundancy and there would be actually only 250GB usable. Is this
right?

I'd prefer two seperate 250GB ATA drives, read/write speed is not as
important to me as size. Will I have to reformat the system when it
arrives to have this configuration?

Bob

"AE1M" wrote in message
s.com...
I am expecting a 710XL Home Office system next week. The system has
two 250GB hard drives for a total of 500GB. It is not clear to me
from the website if they are shipped as one RAID 0 configuration. The
description says RAID 0 performance (?).

My understanding of RAID 0 is that the data is striped across the two
250GB drives. With RAID 0, there is no redundancy. So, if one drive
should fail, I'd loose all data. If it were RAID 1, there would be
redundancy and there would be actually only 250GB usable. Is this
right?


Yes, that is correct - RAID 0 effectively doubles the chance of data loss
due to drive failure because the array
depends on two drives.


I'd prefer two seperate 250GB ATA drives, read/write speed is not as
important to me as size. Will I have to reformat the system when it
arrives to have this configuration?

Yes.

The solution is RAID5 (striping with parity) - but that requires three
drives, or RAID0+1 (which mirrors the array to another pair of drives - of
course, that requires four drives. RAID5 is beyond the capability of most
low-cost controllers, and RAID0+1 is impractical from the standpoint that it
requires four drives.

RAID 1 provides redundancy (not backup - redundancy) - though an alternative
would be to use an external USB 2.0 or firewire drive to store an image of
the system disc. That provides the capacity for removeable backup.