I really need to start backing up so was going to grab another 650gb drive and setup raid 1 mirroring on it using windows drive manager. I only want this backup as it's requires no effort or me to remember! I hear you get a read speed increase and a write decrease, this should in theory speed up my games. Both disc will be 7200rpm how much quicker will my windows load time likely to be? 50% Orr close quicker? Many thanks in advance Cheers
First off, RAID is not backup. There's a discussion here on the same topic. Second, the performance increase really will be minimal. It certainly won't be anywhere near 50% for boot times (you'll need an SSD to dramatically decrease boot times, and even then it probably wouldn't be a 50% decrease), and I would go so far as to say that you wouldn't actually notice the difference at all when it comes to games.
Creating a mirror will duplicate the drives contents so if 1 drive fails then all your data will still be on the other one. Raid 0 or striping on the other hand will setup your disks so the work like dual channel memory, alternating each action between each disk which will increase the maximum speed that your computer can read and write to and from the disk. The only difference you will notice in games is with the loading times, or possibly the pauses that sometimes occur in games when data needs to be loaded from the disk but this will usually only be noticable if you have a slow disk to start with. Where most spinning disks fall down is reading 4kb chunks of data, they can slow your disk to a crawl. Raid won't make much of a difference here but SSD's will. Raid 5 with 3 disks will give you the best of both worlds, your data will be mirrored and your disk reads (but not writes) will nearly be doubled.
Pretty much what i'm saying but it works by alternating each chunk of data between both or however many disks there are in the array, much like dual channel memory.
Uhm, no... get your facts straight... nothing alternating, at the same time, as I said before http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Standard_levels happysack, you might want to read that article too
You miss my point, we're pretty much saying the same thing, each file will be split into chunks and those chunks will be written to each disk alternately
There seems to be some confusion over terminology here. While both drives are indeed being written to and/or read from at the same time, they're not writing/reading the same thing since each file is split up into chunks (blocks) which are written to two drives alternately (i.e. if a file is split up into 4 blocks, then blocks 1 and 3 will be written to drive 1, and blocks 2 and 4 written to drive 2). I think that is what Deders is trying to say anyway.
