Raid 0 vs 1?

I have some general questions. First can someone explain the difference between Raid 0 and 1? Do I need to have 2 hard drives in order to utilize Raid?

I currently have a WD 80 GB special Ed. with 8mb of cache 7200 rpm.

I am planning on getting a new mobo with raid 0 and 1 support included. Can I use this single HD in a Raid configuration?

The Raid on the mobo is through the south brige and I think it's through the serial bus. I have a parrallel to serial converter but the HD is only ATA100.

If I needed to get another HD I can pick up another WD *) GB spec. ed. for around $88. I also was taking a peek at the WD Raptor 10K rpm drive ( SATA). Would it be better to have two of these ( very expensive ) or will one HD work. Maybe 1 80 GB spec ed and 1 WD Raptor.

RAID (Reduntant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is a way of making a set of hard drives look like a single disk on a computer.

There are a few types, the 2 popular ones for desktop systems are:

RAID 0 "Striping"
- Gets 2 (or more) identical disks and formats them as one disk. two 80 Gb disks look like one 160 Gb disk, for example. The data is shared equally through the array, by "Striping" the data. One chunk goes to one hard drive, the next chunk goes to the other, and it interleaves. RAID 0 arrays are very fast, and mine did 55 Mb/second on a good day. If one hard drive breaks, you lose ALL the data.

RAID 1 "Mirroring"
- Takes 2 disks and copies the data identically to both hard drives. Two 80Gb drives look like an 80Gb disk in Explorer. If one drive breaks, the other takes over and you keep the data. Used when data is very important.

There are other types as well: 3, 5, 0+1...


If you decide on a RAID 0 array, backup and store the important data. RAID 0 is fast but a little less reliable..

RAID 1 is slow, I suggest not doing this unless you have critical data that you need backed up.