Hard Drive options

so it has been a few years since i have looked into laptops and since then i see that Clevo now has the ability for up to 3 hard drives, and there are now SSD available and RAID, which seems cool, but i don't really understand what the best configuration would be.

on the one hand i really like SSD technology, but i also want a lot of storage and SSD's don't deliver there.

I've read a bit on RAID ( 0 and 1 seem to be the only ones available for Clevo's new laptops) but everyplace i read gives very vague details as to what kind of performance benefits you get.

and nowhere have i seen anything explaining how i might be able to mix and match. could i have SSD and disk drives? does RAID require 2 of the same drive ( that's what i am guessing)?

any details/explanations (especially concerning options for the NP9850) would be appreciated. or if you know any good guides/faqs. thanks guys.

 

im not an expert but as far as i know raid requires 2 of the same and you can also have a ssd as well but then the 3 will only fit in 17" or 18" laptops.

 

Wikipedia actually has a pretty good article on the basics of RAID ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID).

In laptops, which (so far) can only have 2 to 3 hard drives, the only practical RAID setups are 0, 1, and 5.

For a quick description:

RAID 0 (striped) - breaks your data into chunks and splits them across all the HDDs in the array. This is faster than a single HDD because you can read/write to all of the HDDs in the array at the same time, thus (in theory) doubling or tripling your read/write speed (for 2 or 3 HDDs) compared to a single HDD at that same speed. You also get to combine the HDD sizes, so if you have 2x 500 GB drives in RAID 0, you get 1 TB of space. The problem with RAID 0? If any one of your HDDs fails, you lose _everything_.

RAID 1 (mirrored) - This requires 2 HDDs. You the same data to both of them at the same time, so you basically have a real-time backup. Thus, if you lose one HDD, you can rebuild your data off the other. The problem is, you'll only get the effective capacity of 1 HDD (since all the data has to be doubled). Thus, if the previous 2x 500 GB HDDs were in RAID 1, you'd only have 500 GB of space.

RAID 5 (striped with distributive parity) - This requires 3 drives. In essence, it's a bit of a combination of 0 and 1, where you get extra speed because you're breaking the data into chunks and writing it across multiple drives, but you also have data redundancy implemented through a rotating parity bit. What's important for you to know is, you lose the capacity of 1 drive (so 3x 500 GB drives would be 1 TB of space), and you can lose any 1 HDD and still rebuild your data. RAID 5 seems to be having some issues, though, in notebook solutions so you may wish to avoid it.

Most people will use RAID 1 if they're worried about their data, or RAID 0 if they want the speed and space.

 

If you go with the 3 hdd setup, I would recommend a ssd for your OS drive, for quick boot up and general OS snappiness, and then 2 hdds in raid 0 for you data, programs, games and such. This is the best combo of speed and storage space imo, but eliminates redundancy. However, a backup NAS can fix that without sacrificing speed and storage space (raid 1) or fabled stability issues (raid 5).