<noob state="clueless"> Could someone please explain briefly the difference between the different categories of RAID. I'm still a little confused. Where do RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 5 differ? Isn't a raid a raid? </noob>
RAID0 -- stack the drives end to end so your two 60GB drives look like one big 120GB drive. If either drive fails, things stop working. RAID1 -- Mirror the drives so your two 60GB drives look like one 60GB logical drive. If either of the physical drives fails, the system keeps working from the good drive until you replace the faulty one. RAID5 -- take three or more drives and spread the data across them with interleaved reed-solomon error correction. Your five 60GB drives end up looking like one 4*60GB volume. If any drive fails the missing data can still be figured out using the data and checksums from the good drives and the system keeps running until you replace the faulty drive. afaik there are different ways of configuring raid5 to use different numbers of drives and allow for different numbers of them to fail before the system stops working..