Hi

Is raid someting to do with hard drives (i think it is) if so what do i need and what would it cost?

Thanks

Google is your friend.

Found the following using Google:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/conf/drive-c.html

Cost is relative to the end setup.

Bryan

RAID is about hard drives. RAID is mainly geared towards servers and redundancy for the data stored on them. What you need is a RAID controller and multiple identical drives.

You also need to google RAID and read up on the different levels and their applications.

Many motherboards these days support RAID natively - no need for new hardware. They usually only suppport RAID-0 or RAID-1. There are other RAID's, but are not needed in most consumer level setups.

RAID-0 (Striping)
Splits data between 2 hard drives. Basically, when you save a file, 1/2 of the file is save to one drive and the other 1/2 to the other hard drive. The benefit of this is increased speed. BUT, in most home-user setups, this increase will usually be minimal. The downside is that you are twice as likely to lose your data due to hard drive failure because there are now two drives and if either one fails, you lose all your data.

RAID-1 (Mirroring)
Copies all data to 2 drives. So, if you use (2) 100GB hard drives, windows will see 1 hard drive with a total of 100GB (not 200GB). Any file that is saved will be copied to both drives. This is for data security. If a drive fails, the system will continue on. Just replace the failed drive and the RAID will rebuild that drive.

Michael J