People often ask me about the difference between Raid Levels and how to implement them-

Raid means Redundant Array Of Independant Disks
or Redundant Array Of Inexpensive Disks

You can use IDE,SCSI,SATA,OR FIBRE CHANNEL hard disks
Generally speaking Fibre Channel is the best followed by SCSI.
SATA is still not faster/better than a U320 SCSI drive IMO.
Sata drives are currently the largest in capacity that I've seen and the interface is friendly enough, I've got 4 400 gig sata drives in a raid 5 array now-it was the fastest cheapest way reach that fault tolerant terrabyte mark without selling my first borns forehead as adspace
(I'm saving that for this http://www.techimo.com/forum/t146576.html)


I am of the opinion that if the raid level is not fault tolerant its not a real raid...but anyway....

There are many types of raids-they are done with hardware or software
(IMO hardware is better just more expensive) and typically are made up of between 2 and 32 disks (Though its possible to do alot more-if your gonna use more than thrity-two a hardware raid is the only way to go)

The most commonly used Raid Levels are 0, 1, and 5

These are some links that will further enlighten you:

http://raid.com/04_00.html (really good -covers ever raid known to man I think)

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro...36e31d2a1.mspx

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html
(And of course anything that can be done with Windoze can be done better with Linux)


There's alot more info out there just googling around will yeild lots of knowledge on the subject matter-hope this topic was helpful or useful in some way.