Is RAID 1 on a home PC useful?
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What you're essentially asking is "is it useful to have a live, mirrored copy of my data on a home PC". It depends on your particular needs, there is no possible answer to this question. Personally, I maintain my backups manually, but I definitely know some home users that need the high redundancy RAID-1 provides.– BreakthroughMar 7, 2012 at 0:57
2 Answers
I have a RAID 1 setup on my high end computer so I don't have to worry about one hard drive failing and resulting in a ton of downtime for my work.
RAID 1 is great for home, since you can have one disk fail and still have your data protected. Just slap a new disk if one fails, and let your system do a rebuild. I recommend RAID 1 to most of my clients because the downtime from replacing a drive and installing a new OS is so great.
Just remember RAID is NOT a backup solution! It is a good solution to prevent a single hardware failure from taking your data with you, but not from things like Viruses and other users erasing your data. You still need to copy your data to a second source, preferably offsite, as often as your data changes.
Yes, if you want to get faster drive read performance and be able to survive a disk failure.
You can find more information on read/write performance and fault tolerance properties of RAID on the wikipedia page for Standard Raid levels
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1I think on a home computer it's more a matter of reliability than read performance ...– JoeyMar 27, 2010 at 11:48
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6RAID-1 is faster read performance, at the cost of slower write performance. Mar 27, 2010 at 11:54