RAID: A Guide For All ... Part 1

The use of RAID, a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, up until a few years ago was pretty much limited to servers and high end workstations; this was primarily due to the cost of the controller and the accompanying hard drives. Today that's not at all the case! Most of the newer motherboards provide one or more onboard RAID controllers capable of delivering configurations up to and including RAID 5. With the cost of disk storage at an all time low the two primary barriers to using this once esoteric form of data storage have been lifted.

Let me state for the record that I know there are a number of quality guides on the Internet covering this subject. My rationale for writing this guide is quite simple, the most recent guide(s) I was able to find was written in 2004, the only exception to this was a white paper article published by California Software Labs in February, 2006. Even though a great deal of the techniques for RAID implementation haven't changed, much of the equipment has. In 2004 onboard RAID controllers were just beginning to appear, today they're commonplace and considerably better. In 2004 SATA drives were not the standard as they are today.