What RAID configuration is most appropriate for a home user?

Solution 1:

Depends on what you are striving for:

Raw speed: RAID0

Mirroring: RAID1

Integrity + Speed: RAID5 (one disk parity)

Notes on each:
RAID0: If you lose one drive, you lose all data
RAID1: You have to cut your total drive size in half
RAID5: You lose one drive's worth of space, and need at least 3 drives. You will need to wait for the drive to rebuild if you replace a bad drive, and during a rebuild, if you lose a second drive, you will lose your data

You can also combine RAID configs to achieve different setups (RAID10, RAID50)

All being said, if you are looking for speed, but don't care about losing data, go RAID0, if you are looking to have a backup drive incase one goes down, go RAID1. RAID5 is good if you want some speed, and to have a backup incase on drive goes.

One thing to remember: RAID is never a backup solution

Solution 2:

RAID 0 (striping) is almost never appropriate.

The statement that it "improves speed" is misleading: it improves the maximum transfer rate, but that is irrelevant in most applications (the only exception for a home user that I can think of would be video editing) as modern HDs have bulk transfer rates upwards of 70 MB/s which are more than sufficient.

What makes HDs slow is usually random seeks, and RAID 0 does absolutely nothing to improve those. RAID 1 potentially does (probably not with software RAID though), so in fact RAID 1 may speed up typical applications far more than RAID 0 - and it drastically reduces (rather than drastically increasing) your risk of total data loss.

Solution 3:

I'd recommend using something with mirroring — probably RAID 1, because I don't feel like there's a great need to get fancy with a home system. Backups are one thing; degraded but uninterrupted service when one of your disks blows up is another, very worthwhile thing.

Solution 4:

Raid is NOT a backup solution. It's a redundancy solution (or a performance enhancement solution if you're using it for striping). A large number of disk failures are due to environmental factors (excessive heat, etc) so assuming you can use it instead of decent back ups is not a safe bet.

If you have a RAID setup looking for a performance boost go with RAID 0 for striping. If you're doing it for backups, drop RAID and find a good online backup service.