RAID - What is it?

I think this is where I should post this question, if not I apologize.
I would like to know precisely what a RAID set up is and what it's function is supposed to be.

If a motherboard with RAID dies and another mb is installed that does not have RAID, can it still detect the RAID setup?

Is RAID only used to mirror h/d's?

Is it a viable option to use in the following situation:
Computer tower is sitting on the floor (carpeted) in an office and hardware failures are commonplace especially h/d's (I think b/c it's sitting on a carpet).
The company got a former employee to come have a look at the computer and he decided b/c of all the failure's to put in a RAID system and mirror the h/d's so if one h/d failed there would always be a backup. They think the failures are due to a high EM field. The computer at one point actually started smoking and there was a hole put in the side of the comp.
(all this took place before I got here so I'm going on what someone else told me).

The mb failure took place 2 weeks ago and I suggested they take the tower to a computer tech company that I know. They did not see a RAID setup and had questions as to how the computer was even running seeing as how things were totally messed up inside. (I didn't see inside the tower myself). They installed a new mb without the RAID.

The specs that I know about the comp in question is p4 ?ghz 1GB RAM, 3h/d's.

I admit my limitations and this is beyond me but the person who put the system together is upset that I suggested it be taken to techs who specialize in computer problems If you want a car fixed u don't take it to a dentist is the way I look at it.

If anyone can give me some possible answers and/or solutions I would greatly appreciate it.

This is a small company with not a lot of extra money.

Thanks for anything u can give me.

Rose

 

Sorry I forgot to tell you it is running Win98SE. I looked at the machine and honestly can't tell you much more than what I did before except for the following:
Drive c: 14GB
Drive d: 15.9 GB
Drive e: 4.44 GB
Drive f: 4.38 GB
Drive g: 4.41 GB
Drive h: 22.1 GB
1021.0 MB RAM

 

Googled "raid array" for you.

http://www.google.com/search?as_q=&num=20&hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=raid+array&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=lang_en&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=&safe=images

88,000+ hits. Check out the first few listed. Baz

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You will not be able to use your RAID solution if you have switched to a Motherboard that does not support RAID as it is at a hardware level.

What can be done is buy a IDE RAID card and set up whatever form of raid you want. See below for the RAID types.


Raid is used usually, for fault tolerant purposes, there is more than one disk configured in a RAID array, and for speed and compatibility purposes, those disks are connected to a fast controller. There are a few different configurations that can be performed depending on the needs.

1. RAID-0. This level is typically defined as a non-redundant group of striped disk drives without parity. In RAID-0, disk striping divides data into 64K blocks and spreads it equally, in a fixed rate and order, among all disks in an array. Since RAID-0 does not provide redundancy, if one drive in the array crashes, the entire array crashes. However, RAID-0 arrays deliver the best performance and data storage efficiency of any array type.


2. RAID-1, better known as "disk mirroring", is simply a pair of disk drives which store duplicate data, but appears to the computer as a single drive. Striping is not used, although multiple RAID-1 arrays may be striped together to appear as a single larger array consisting of pairs of mirrored drives, typically referred to as "Dual-level array." Writes must go to both drives in a mirrored pair so that the information on the drives is kept identical. Each individual drive, however, can perform simultaneous read operations. Mirroring thus doubles the read performance of an individual drive and leaves the write performance unchanged. To implement disk mirroring, you need a minimum of two hard disks.


3. RAID-2 arrays sector-stripe data across groups of drives, with some drives relegated to storing ECC information. Since most disk drives today embed ECC information within each sector, RAID-2 offers no significant advantages over RAID-3 architecture.


4. RAID-3 sector-stripes data across groups of drives, but one drive in the group is dedicated to storing parity information. RAID-3 relies on the embedded ECC in each sector for error detection.


5. RAID-4 is identical to RAID-3 except that large stripes are used, so that records can be read from any individual drive in the array (except the parity drive), allowing read operations to be overlapped. However, since all write operations must update the parity drive, they can not be overlapped. This architecture offers no significant advantages over RAID-5.


6. RAID-5 includes disk striping with parity distributed across multiple drives. Striping with parity is currently the most popular approach to fault tolerance design. It differs from the other levels by writing parity information across all disks in an array (the entire stripe set.) The data and parity information are arranged so that the two are always on different disks. In a stripe set with parity, a minimum of 3 to a maximum of 32 drives are supported.


You will not be able to use your RAID solution if you have swithced to a Motherboard that does not support RAID as it is at a hardware level