RAID : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

RAID comes in several levels: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 53 and 0+1. For home use, you are probably only interested in levels 0 (speed) or 1 (safety), though with disk prices coming people wanting higher performance and reliability are going for the higher raid levels.

RAID is usually handled transparently by a hardware RAID controller. The software thinks it is talking to a single disk. Software-only RAID is a rather dangerous feature to use in Win2K.

• It’s probably the least-used feature of Win2K, so it’s not well tested.
• The OS must be running for it to work; if it’s not, you are dead in the water. You may not be able to reinstall the OS without reformatting, in which case you will lose all your data.