Maximum PC

I'd actually pay money for a walk-through of the entire experience, with how-tos.

Just ask. I can walk you through.

Mind you, if you mean to use the software, you would have to locate the software by legal means or otherwise in order for me to do so.
Every situation is different, but if you are good at trial and error, I am sure you could figure most out by yourself.

Runtime software is located at http://www.runtime.org/

Since I tried several other competing products with the ability to recover files (But gibberish contained within) I imagine that different situations could reveal different results. I however was blown away at how easy it was to recover all my data. I have been using the recovered files and have not been able to encounter a damaged file yet. (Not to say one doesn't exist).

Anyhow, Runtime also has a RAID reconstruct tool as well. You may want to check it out too. I didn't use it however.

wouldnt in raid 0+1 and 10 two be able to fail if they were the right ones?

For example
raid 0+1:

drive 0 + drive 1
mirrored to
drive 2 + drive 3
in this case, drives 0 and 1 are striped, then mirroed to 2 and 3
so if 2 and 3 failed, the array doesnt break

10
drive 0 mirroed to drive 1 + drive 2 mirroed to drive 3
in this case drive 0 or 1 could fail, and drive 2 or 3, still maintaining the array.

This is the way I understand raid 1 and 0 please let me know if i am incorrect about something

You can have two drives fail in this scenario.. You can have 1 & 2 or 3 & 4 fail without loosing data.
-BUT-
Your data is goners if you have the following combinations fail:
1 & 3 or 1 & 4 or 2 & 3 or 2 & 4

Basically, if you had four drives you wanted to utilize, the best all-around way is to RAID 5. Only drawback I see with RAID 5 is the slow write speeds, but it sure is neat.

If you want to be able to protect your array for any two discs failed in a four drive array, you would need to use
RAID 6 <- Click for guide on RAID 6

Guides from PC GUIDE
Hard drives PC Guide
RAID Guide

Hard Drives are like fingerprints.
New or old, large or small, failure can happen at any
time for any reason.
If you can layer redundancy into any single point of
failure, you have at least taken care of 'due diligence' as
a lawyer would say.
Personally I treat data like I was going to war.
If you have people counting on you to make sure it is there
24-7, then it has to be there. There is NO excuse for it not to
be there. If your data center gets hit with a 50mm round, your
data may be knocked off line, but your redundant solutions
need to be enacted so to restore connection a.s.a.p.
If you were on the front line and your troops couldn't use the
network because of a drive failure and men died, how would
you explain to their families that it was because a HD failed?
Adopt the approach of zero failure. Especially if there is one.
Once you tell your customers how you feel, then they will know
you value their data more than they do.
You will establish life long relationships.
So, what do I use?
I use all drive technologies.
Fibre Channel, SCSI, SATA, IDE, Tape, Optical Disc.
I actually prefer remanufactured drives. I believe this gives me a slight
edge when it comes to multiple drive failure. It has been my experience that 3 brand new drives in a RAID 5 will fail around the same time.
If you use 3 remanufactured drives, the failure tends to be isolated to 1 drive.
I have multiple RAID 5 arrays at multiple locations and off site back up and I still find extra tape drives to tier the data back ups. I like to even have back ups based on age, so if a customer writes over their data and
needs to restore to last weeks file then it is no problem.
I have SCSI drives that have past their 10 year mark of service. I don't have any IDE drives that can say the same.
SCSI and Fibre Channel rock!!!!

I wonder why SCSI drives are so much better for longer run life?.
From what I am told, SCSI drives were at one time simply IDE drives with a different circuit board attached to the same housing and the same discs. I am not sure if they are still doing this as I would have to dissasemble the drives and compare them to one another for similarities. Mind you, one thing that majorly stops me from using SCSI is that the capacities are now lagging 1/10th the available sizes IDE or SATA offers for the same price, or 1/2 the size available at about 10 times the price. You will never see a 1Tb SCSI device available at the same time Hitachi released thier 1TB drive. They always sell the SATA before SCSI. In the early days, it used to be the other way around.

SCSI is in my opinion a much much better idea in whole. It is more flexible, expandable, faster response times and better speeds for multiple file reads/writes than any SATA or RAID0 SATA combination can offer.

SCSI is ideal for your operating system and software to run on, but for regular storage of multimedia or junk, RAID 5 in SATA or (older IDE) is an ideal option for those who don't need exceptional speed for writing, and for those who intermittently access this data. I never run my operating system off of RAID as I feel that the optimal performance is given from a single drive setup for it. If I need backups, I can intermittently do so to the redundant HUGE RAID 5 array. So what if it takes a while. If anyone has SMART intelligent drive reporting, the drive will often inform you of impending drive failure. Most drives also report how many hours the drive was in use and an estimated time where the manufacturer suggests when the drive should fail. I found out that this information is also stored on the drives discs and not on the circuit board on the drive. If a person had the right tools, they could theoretically wipe the drive and start over. I am certain some engineer somewhere has taken a special course on how to hard-code the drives firmware to clock when to start faking sector errors and other random stuff to frustrate people into buying more hard drives. It is a moving part anyways. In an ideal world, solid-state storage will soon be the only feasible option, but alas, in a fiscal world, things MUST be designed to fail, so this will be an issue we will all suffer from from now until our Capitalism system ceases to exist.

Until then, I will always enjoy RAID 5

Great to hear your opinion Pixels.
I agree with a lot of what you said.
I am curious if anybody here runs Fibre Channel drives?
I think they are the cats meow.
Knock on wood, I have never had a FC drive fail.
Rumors comming down the pike speak of 10GBPS!!!
I will not be able to afford any of it mind you, but prices
are falling on the older stuff.

This RAID guide is out dated. Hard drives are too cheap and too slow not to run RIAD 0 without some external USB backup. The hard drive bottleneck is more reason than ever to use such configuration, even if the latest Raptor is you C drive. Where did SATA2 come from? The fastest single hard drive as of this writing doesn't even surpass the SATA1 spec.

Are there any performance gains when using RAID 5 compared to RAID 0? I was thinking if getting 3 Raptor X.

Depends on what you are using the RAID for.
If you are expecting your OS to run faster, then 'NO', but
if you are serving out a ton of little files, like clip art, then 'YES'.

I say that, because Windows is always writing to the drive.
Damn pagefile.

RAID 0 is suicide for data. So on just a data protection stance I would
always go with RAID 5 over 0.

It's been my experience that RAID 0's performance advantage over a single drive (or RAID 1) solution can be quite significant, and it well worth doing.

Worried about data loss in RAID 0? So am I. I run daily backups to eSATA. If my RAID array breaks, worst case scenario is a day's worth of lost data and having to reinstall the OS and applications. Not a big deal to me.

Sorry about the late answer on this.

In RAID 0+1, you can only have 1 drive fail.

00+00

Practically, losing one drive IS actually losing two. As losing a single drive from a contributing RAID0 loses that entire RAID0. Even if the other drive in the array is fine, the array is still broken.

You then "limp along" as a single, unmirrored RAID0.

Whereas with RAID10

11+11

Here you can lose one drive from a contributing RAID1 and still have that array contribute to the RAID0.
You could lose one drive from EACH contributing RAID1 and still "limp along" as a regular RAID0.

Is there any way to recover data on a pair of RAID 0 drives without going to a data recovery company?

I'm building a new machine and wondering how i should do this:

Drives:
4x400GB
320GB
and purchasing 4 750's or 1TB's for a storage array (raid 5 or 6 i can expand to 8 drives)
Onboard 5 usable ports nforce 570sli and seperate 3ware pci-e 8 port card

What i'm wondering is what i should do for the os/program files/swap. Should I run a raid 1+0 with the 400's with everything on it, or use the the 400's for os/programs and the 320GB as a swap only. Other option is running the swap on the 4 drive storage array?

I could buy another 320 or too. How should I do this? I mainly want the swap to not slow down the os or programs i'm running, storage will just be files that do not need high transfer speeds but do need redundancy.

Great guide.

One minor discrepancy...unless you know different, Windows 2000/XP does not offer Raid 1. The option "Add Mirror" remains greyed out.

That does not mean you can't run a 3rd Party app to control a raid controller (even onboard), but natively the OS doesn't support Raid 1, thus does not support Raid 0+1.

Minor point, though to an otherwise very well put together guide.

I have a question about JBOD.

I know what it is, and i think i'd it'd be perfect for me ( i have numerous 80's 100's 120's and 250's) and i'd like to make them one big drive. now, my question is that if one of my drives dies, can the others still be used?

so say i have 80, 80, 120, 80, 250 gb drives all in jbod raid, and the 120 dies, can i still get my data from the other drives?

In a JBOD configuration each disk still runs independently, it only appears to be one drive. If one drive fails you will loose the data on that drive, because there is no redundancy that data cannot be recovered (unless it’s backed up somewhere else). You will not loose data on any of the other drives you will just loose the data on the drive that failed.

When I built my system I put two 500 gb Sata hds into RAID 1 for mirroring (so in case 1 failed, I could keep going). When the computer starts up it flashes a message in red about degraded RAID array. (VISTA Ultimate). It's been operating fine for a couple of years (other than that). In the bios the drive on SATA 2 isn't recognized. Is there a way to re-establish the RAID without wiping the drives and starting over?

does any one know what raid set up did Dream Machine 2011 use ? 9 TB In Raid 5 ?

i have 2 Vertex 3 and plan install raid 0 but for space i am thinking copying DM2011 and getting 9 or 6 TB ? Help Please