SIer is right. Not sure what "contradictory information and opinions" you might find. Strange. It is pretty basic - all data is written simultaneously to two different drives. It is 100% for catastrophic drive failure - nothing more, nothing less. Writing files, deleting files - no matter what, all duplicated to both drives.
Though there are cases where "writing" and "reading" speeds may be affected, my gut says - at the very least they should be identical to before RAID 1. Other RAID options give you improved READING but decrease WRITE speeds.
To what end does one do this - RAID 1 - now that is the question. If you had a job doing multimedia and that consisted of a 2TB drive - could you afford to lose your work if it crashed tomorrow? If the answer is NO, you would first setup a RAID 1 pair by buying a 2nd 2TB drive.
For me I have done this with offline storage. I could have had 4GB at my disposal but as it became my #1 storage option, I chose to keep both 2TB's mirrored via RAID 1.
My boot is backed up to "D:" as images. If I came home and found that my boot had crashed, I would shutdown the system, find an old 120GB drive - throw it in, and recover from my image and off I would continue to work.
The piece I would have no clue about is - breaking the raid - would your system see both drives as EQUAL and then could you format ONE of them to be "something else" while the other remains as the "BOOT" drive (or main "DATA" drive depending on which pair was RAID 1)? Don't know.
Personally, assuming the warranty was over, if I needed more space, I'd leave the RAID alone and just buy a drive for $50-100.
(Note that RAID 1 does not eliminate backing up - a power spike that could render the MOBO inoperable could easily hit the drives too - so don't think that RAID 1 is a be all end all cure). |
