> RAID stands for Redundent Array of Inexpensive Disk. It is a mechanism by
> which Hard Disk are made more reliable. Technically speaking its
> an array of
> Hard Disks, on which the data is stored in a redundent manner. So even if
> one of the Hard Disks blows away ur data is not lost.Generally used in
> places where the Data is very critical, and the person has lot of money to
> buy hard disks.
> On most of the motherboards, u will find support for RAID. But they also
> support normal IDE controllers. So u always have the libery to use RAID or
> NOT.

     As an minor addendum I feel we should also add that RAID can result in
much higher HD performance. By doing reads and writes from and to multiple
drives the apparent data transfer rates and access times can be better than
with one drive alone. However, to get the best of this effect you need a
SCSI RAID system, IDE works but SCSI is better for multiple simultaneous
accesses. TTYL

                         PCBUILD's List Owner's:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>