Raid..Mirroring...Large OS/boot drives

I'm first looking for some basic information to my research of setting up a Raid.

1st suffice to say with 5 kids i was sick of re-buying dvds getting scratched and downloaded them all onto a large hard drive inside my pc. My wife also uses this same computer for HiDef video editing and website stuff.

I want to set up this raid mainly to save data if one drive fails i'll have the exact replica on the other drive (including the OS and all our programs-so sick of reinstalling and loosing data)

currently I have two 500gb drives (not raided/mirrored etc.) I want to purchase two 1TB or 1.5TB drives and mirror them.

Is it true that large drives are not good for setting up raid/mirror?

I also heard that large drives are not good for having it as your boot/OS... Is there any truth to this?

 

I am a fan of using mirrored RAID arrays, and with the price of 1Tb drives dropping below $100, it is hard to rationalize why not to have one. I recommend everyone consider it.

However, a mirrored drive is not a suitable backup plan. Mirrored drives will not protect you from accidentally deleted files or folders, corrupt OS files, or malware damage. So you need a regular back up plan too, perhaps to a NAS - network access storage full of 1.5Tb drives.

Note that when going with RAID1 mirrored, you should buy 3 identical drives at the time of purchase to ensure all are the exact same, and the spare is on hand. What I do is periodically pull one drive out and swap it with the 3rd drive kept at the bank. This ensures I have a fairly recent backup in off-site storage - essential in case the house burns down.

Some people like having their OS on a separate drive - so a large drive would be a waste. Also with the OS on 1 drive, and other stuff on the other drives, both drives can be used at once.

I know of no technical reason RAID cannot be a boot drive as the RAID is enabled in the BIOS, before the OS is touched.