Good time of the day to everyone, I am now weighting pros and cons of setting up a RAID solution to a workgroup server which would primarily be a file server. What i should like to know is whether system crash of WinNT 4.0 or Windows2000 may influence in any way my data protected by hardware RAID-1 or RAID-3. Is all data under hardware RAID safe after re-installing WinNT? What changes in case of setting up WinNT built-in software RAID? Thank you for your help in advance.

One thing to know, that if you are using a HARDWARE raid solution, NT doesn't really even know its there. It sees all the drives in a volume of the array (raid5 or raid1) as a single physical drive. It acts the same as if it was on a single hard drive. What this means is, that if NT crashes corrupting some files on the hard drive on its way out, which can happen, it will do the same on a RAID. What you get by using RAID is redundancy. If a hard drive failes, you can just replace it without having to reinstall everything. Using NTs built in software Raid1 or Raid5 is much different, and I do not recommend it. I strongly recommend a hardware solution.