I'm confused. Is a 2TB RAID really 4TB?

Hi Neon

Raid is usually used in servers as it separates the data into more than one drive. the idea is to have lots of storage and built in redundancy should something fail.

Mirroring is what you are really after i think, that is a copy of what you have on a separate drive not part of the same physical drive.

so you would need another hard drive not the same drive.

Mirroring requires 2 physical hard drives minimum. there are more sophisticated systems which use stripping as well which would require 4 physical drives not 2 drives.

then we have a parity checking system which now would need 9 physical drive this what was used with a SCSI system.

this deposited one bit of data from each word on each drive plus one bit of data on the 9th which was the parity bit. Complicated..but a good idea for security. and failures of a hard disk system.

If this work you really want to protect and you have the money would consist of 2 extra drives used for HOT Swapping when either drive fails.

that would be the best solution but expensive and what should be used by people who do not want any outage on a system

you got it all wrong.

RAID is a method to connect more than one hard drive together.

raid IS FACILITATED BY THE motherboard, NOT A SPECIFIC DRIVE.

MANY VERSION OF raid ARE AVAILABLE, YOU PROBEBLY CAN USE RAID1.

RAID 1 is "miroring", it copys all data to 2 (or more) different hard drives.

as in a MIROR IMAGE.

IN THIS CASE> 2 hard drives of 1TB EACH> will have the total storage space of...1TB !

in RAID 0 (STRIPPING) the data is writen into 2 drives, but 50/50, > much faster data transfer speed!

in RAID 5, 6, 10, jobb, etc YOU ADD (SUM UP) the total hdd space, ie; 2 X 1TB will act like one HDD with 2TB space.

DO NOT buy a "raid" hard drive, its a marketing gimmik.

buy 2 IDENTICAL hard drives, but befor you do know this;

NOT all motherboard support RAID, only the expensive ones, not brand name computers.

RAID drivers are not easy to install, you got to be a pro, know how to CREATE THE DRIVER, and you must have a FLOPPY DRIVE,

you will have to reinstall EVERYTHING on your machine.

if you are a novice, just get an external hard drive with a back up software.

I would install RAID 0 if I was you, to get extreame preformance @ video editing,

my highend machines use 2 HDD @ 15,000 rpm each in raid 0, effectinglly making the data transfer rate greater than 30,000 rpm & 6GB/sec

PS. all external RAID boxes are not worth one cent.

Just get some good (no bigger than 1.5TB) hard drives (seagate) @ 7200 RPM, AND TAKE IT TO A PRO BUILDER, for 2TB + 2TB back up, you will need 4 hdd of 1TB, each 2 will be paired @ raid 5 or 6 or 10, than the pairs (they will be one hdd@that time) will be connected to the other pair in RAID 1.