Welcome to a new (and hopefully) regular feature on Techgage - the SysAdmin corner. Most of us are power-users on the desktop, whether it be for games, graphic arts or just for the sheer fun of building and tweaking. However, many of us also have to carry our computer skills into other tasks - both at work and at home - where we need to focus on productivity and goals instead of TFlops and SiSoftware Sandra benchmarks.

Today, we're going to take a look at one of the most often misunderstood features built into modern motherboards (and decent operating systems) - the redundant array, or RAID. On the TG IRC, I was recently asked to explain my home server setup, and people were surprised at my choices as well as just how fool-proof my home server really was, so I figured that I would pass along a basic understanding of why and when to choose RAID, what its risks are, some basic guidelines and even a couple uses you may not have thought of.

Let's get started!