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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. – Breakthrough Mar 7 at 0:57
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2 Answers

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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.

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up vote 4 down vote

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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I think on a home computer it's more a matter of reliability than read performance ... – Joey Mar 27 '10 at 11:48
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RAID-1 is faster read performance, at the cost of slower write performance. – quack quixote Mar 27 '10 at 11:54
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