Is RAID 1 on a home PC useful? [closed]

Is RAID 1 on a home PC useful?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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