I'm currently on a 7200rpm 160gb and lets just say the boot/read/write times are horrendously bad. getting a £40 30GB SSD and a 500GB £30 hard drive is not economical (can't afford it
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Ok, what is the make and model of the drive you have already ?.
Not sure what you mean about not being able to afford the SSD and 500GB being too expensive for you then you talk about possibly getting two 500GB drive (10 quid cheaper by your prices). How much data do you really need ?. Do you store lots of video or have the need for 1TB ?.
So I was thinking of RAID, do all motherboards support it, what Do I need?
I was thinking of getting 2 250/500GB hard drives,
Would it be worth it or do I get a 10000rpm boot/500GB or the other option?
If you don't need massive amounts of space then get a 60/64GB SSD (Crucial M4 on sale at OCUK for around 90 quid). Use your 160GB drive for storage. My Win7 Home Premium + Office 2010 + other bits and pieces comes in at under 30GB.
That will give the best performance increase all over the place.
If you cannot stretch to the 90 quid then you have the option of either a single fast drive (10k drives are hot and noisy), or a couple of fast drives striped (Raid 0).
Ok, Raid....
Raid 0: The data is shared over a number of drives (2+) and so can be written and read quicker. As people have said, the downsides are that if you loose one drive then you loose all the data. The speed increase is not double the speed of a single drive but you will get a noticeable jump. If you want to increase the space on your array, by adding another disk for example, you need to break the array (loose all data) and then rebuild a new array with the new drive included.
Raid 1: Mirroring. Data is mirrored from one drive to another. This means you have two sets of the data but have only half the total space on all drives combined available. Needs to be two drives for obvious reasons. Increasing space means replacing the drives with larger capacity drives.
Raid 0 + 1: A mix of the two above configurations. Drives are striped and then mirrored. You need a minimum of 4 drives (two drives to stripe together, two drive to mirror the stripe set). Give you speed and redundancy but at the cost of 50% size loss (total volume of all drives / 2).
Raid 5: This uses a set of drives (3 minimum) and uses a technique which combines them in to one large array with redundancy by using parity. This results in redundancy where by if you loose one drive, the data can be rebuilt from the parity data on the other two drives. The rebuild process can be slow though.
JBOD (spanning): Grouping multiple drive together to form one big drive. Can increase on the fly but loose one drive and loose it all. No redundancy.
If you are using for just home use and either make regular backups or are not bothered about the stuff you have then after a SSD, striping will give the best performance. If you want performance with the max space available but need redundancy and can afford 3 drives then Raid 5 is better. Raid 1 and 0+1 are great for critical data but do you really need it.
Note that some hard drives are not best suited for arrays. I have had a lot of issues with WD Green drives in arrays. Array redundancy should also not be mistaken for backup. Redundancy helps to ensure the data you currently have is available through various means. Backups are snapshots at set times or based on set events (deleting files for example). Redundancy will not bet a file back that was deleted yesterday but a backup may. I don't use redundancy as I can stand to have my machine down for a couple of days while I rebuild it but I do have backups (second set of drives / USB drive). None of my data is critical but some would be a shame to loose (family photos etc).
My advice;
1. SSD for boot, 160GB drive for storage.
2. Striped array (2*500GB).
3. Fast 10K hard drive.
Make sure any critical data is backed up as none of these provide any redundancy.
RB
