RAID, Mechanical Drives Still in the Fight

Ever heard of RAID? No, I am not talking about pirates getting away with treasure. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks.  As hard drives approach the Terabyte range (1000 Gigabytes), they have become inexpensive to the point where RAID becomes a consumer level alternative to the trendy Solid State Drives (SSD’s). The advantage over SSD is there no finite amount of data writes but of course mechanical failure is always eminent. To do so, you will need to back up your data, purchase identical drives, most likely have to purchase a RAID controller and be willing to get your hands dirty to install the additional hardware under the assumption your PC system meets the requirements.  You can read more about RAID on your own, but my preferred configuration is a RAID 0+1. My preferred configuration gets the performance boosts by splitting (stripping) the data into two drives as shown below and backs up ( mirrors) the entire data into a third drive.