As soon as RAID controllers started being built into affordable motherboards, I decided using RAID for my home PC was a good idea. For the last 6-7 years, I have used RAID on every PC I have built.
There are several RAID configurations. RAID 0 (striping) utilises two or more identical hard drives, and splits each file equally across them, yielding much faster disk performance (limited by the throughput of the disk I/O controller) as the disks read and write at the same time. The total available storage is the sum of the individual drives’ capacity. RAID 1 (mirrored) could be considered the opposite of striping, in that each file is written to all disks. This effectively provides realtime backup since the content of all drives in the array is identical, with no performance cost.
I’ve only ever used RAID 0. For a home PC, RAID 1 doesn’t offer any real benefits that cannot be achieved with a half-decent backup policy, but effectively doubles the cost of disk space if you use two disks.
