Therese Trudeau wrote: > Ah great i'll check out the URL thanks. > > One thing, an earlier poster reccomended RAID 5 instead of RAID 1. > I guess if one only has 2 drives RAID 1 is the way to go but if I have 4 > drives he said go with > RAID 5 over RAID 1. Isn't RAID 1 mirroring a better solution for a 4 drive > array or am I missing something here? Depends on your needs, RAID 1 is certainly faster. RAID 1+0 faster still, but requires more disk(s/space). Going back to my preferred array vendor, 3PAR, their software/hardware provides the ability to do online RAID conversions to/from RAID 0, 1+0, and 5+0 (3+1 parity to 8+1 parity) with no impact to the server. It also provides the ability to run multiple raid levels on the same physical disks because the RAID is made up of portions of the disks (each disk split into 256MB chunks), rather than the full physical disks themselves. Really flexible/powerful/fast. I love it! On my array I run RAID 1+0 on the outer regions of the disk(~7% faster than the inner regions), and RAID 5+0 (8+1) on the inner regions of the disks. Of course this sort of technology isn't priced for the desktop unless your doing something like desktop consolidation with virtualization or remote application hosting/thin client. nate