With desktop computers at the moment non-volatile storage options are fairly limited – and for everyday use the humble hard disk drive (HDD) is still the weapon of choice.
Hard Drives are proven performers – they’ve been around since 1956 – but they have a few limitations, mostly related to the fact that they have mechanical components:-
- They fail – eventually, and usually catastrophically.
- Their access speed is limited by the speed it takes the head to physically move across the platter and find the data you’re after – called ’seek time’
One approach to overcome these limitations is called ‘RAID’ – or a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (some folks argue that Inexpensive should be Independent, but I’ll beg to differ).
In this post, I’ll be investigating ways to speed up your computer - and I’ll be test driving RAID and the fastest available single drive solution (Western Digital Raptor) along the way - let’s fish out the facts from the hype.
What is RAID?
There are several flavors of RAID, but the major ones are (more…)
