Hi andzgrid,

Ever since my 120GB main WD HDD died on me, losing all that precious data, my dream was to have a RAID1 configuration. Which I finally managed to have more than a year ago by buying two WD Caviar Green 1TB SATA2 HDDs and setting them up, at first using the on-board chip (which led to it breaking 3-4 times for no apparent reason), then directly from Windows (7 - and it worked without a hitch).

After half a year or so, I realized there are better ways to protect one's data, like software that executes automatic, scheduled back-ups, for instance and that there's no point wasting all that storage (1TB) into redundancy of data that may not even be that important to me (e.g. music or movies).

Bottom line here: I don't know about the ISRT, but if you go for RAID, use Windows (surprisingly, it's the better, more reliable solution as I learned the hard way and then confirmed on the forums I researched). If you choose to have a software solution, that's also a good idea, but unless you go for speed with a RAID0, both options (RAID or software) are valid, from my point of view.

Oh, and one last thing: I think it's common sense that if you have a RAID1 configuration, you don't put your OS on it...not sure you even can, but anyway...

That's my personal experience.

Cheers!

PS: I think this is more of "Chat Room" topic then a suggestion/feedback thread, but that's just me.

Edit: by the way, my current (RAID-less) configuration includes:
1x 60GB Corsair F60 SATA2 SSD -> OS & installed programs (I can't think of a better use for an SSD then this)
2x 1TB WD Caviar Green SATA2
1x 500GB WD Caviar Green SATA2
1x 500GB WD Caviar Blue SATA2
...and it's fast enough for me.

Edit2: if you're looking for Boinc speed, then I can recommend RAMDisk. Saves you the trouble of replacing your HDD or SSD every 1.5-2 years. That is if you have enough RAM.

I have one SSD drive in a netbook and it made it faster, I have ordered a 2nd SSD drive for my laptop to speed it up too. I have toyed with Raid-1 but ended up going with a free backup solution instead as that is what I wanted the Raid for in the first place. I now backup all my machines monthly to a 2TB drive in a networked cruncher. With a gigabit network hub it happens much faster than with a 10/100 hub, I backup one machine a night throughout the month.

If you REALLY want speed you can try Dotsch's network crunching or even his crunching from a usb stick, both are Linux based and require little setup. The networked one uses a networked hard drive instead of a local drive so is fast depending on your network connection.