RAID is an acronym that stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, and as this suggests, combines multiple hard-drives that work together, so that if one hard-drive goes down, your data storage does not. A basic RAID configuration might be Raid 1, or Raid 0.

Raid 1 is a basic raid setup where two disks are used together, and data is “mirrored” from one disk to another. The two disks are considered to be one disk as far as your operating system is concerned, and will continue to function as long as one disk remains operating. The advantage of Raid 1 is you can lose one drive and keep going. The disadvantage is if you use two drives say of 500GB, you only get 500GB of space, not 1TB. So you lose half of the space you’d normally have out of those two drives. So you’re trading space for redundancy.

Raid 0 isn’t really raid at all, and is where two or more disks are used together to increase the size of a virtual raid disk. For example, three 1TB drives work together to make one 3TB drive. The raid configuration also provides improved performance. The problem with this is, if one disk out of your three dies, then you lose the entire array. For this reason, Raid 0 isn’t used a great deal, except in combination with Raid 1. For example you could have two virtual raid 0 disks combined with Raid 1, so you get an increase in performance and redundancy thrown in. Using the examples above you could have a 3TB raid array combining raid 1 and raid 0, but that would cost you six 1TB drives.

Another way to do it, is to use raid 5. A raid 5 array distributes the data across the total amount of disks, increasing performance and at the same time providing redundancy. Using our six 1TB drives in raid 5 configuration, we would end up with a 5TB raid array. If any of the six disks go down, the array continues to operate, as it automatically uses data from the remaining five to reconstruct the data from the sixth. The array will have a reduced performance until the broken drive is replaced, but all data will be intact. The only way you can lose data with a raid 5 drive is if two drives fail at the same time, which is highly unlikely. You can even configure a hot spare drive, that isn’t used in the raid array for any purpose except to be added should one of the main drives goes down. The hot spare can then be converted to an array drive and you continue until you install a replacement.

So to summarize, raid 5 allows you to store data with increased disk performance, and also allows you to lose one drive to failure without affecting your data.

Both components vary highly depending on the needs of the user building the PC. A gamer naturally wants a fast video card to play games, someone who collects photos or videos needs lots of storage and Office worker a quiet video card.

Build your own PC: Storage

Storage devices are hard drives and optical drives. Hard drives can be divided into the two categories Solid State Drives (SSD) and conventional hard drives.

There are basically two options for selecting hard drives:

• Pick only conventional hard drives
• Combine conventional and solid state drives

Conventional hard drives have the advantage that they provide more storage for a cheaper price than Solid State Drives. Solid State Drives on the other hand are more expensive, offer way less storage but are way faster than convention drives. This is beneficial during system boot, playing games or loading applications.

The PC budget plays a big role in deciding the storage components. A good reliable Solid State Drive sells for about $250 for 64 Gigabytes of storage. Good conventional hard drives provide more than ten times the storage for that price.

PC users with a budget of about $400 for hard drives can consider combining Solid State Drives and conventional hard drives. The SSD would be used for the operating system and important applications (or games) whereas the standard hard drive would be used for storage.

Users with a lower budget should concentrate on buying a good fast hard drive instead that will be used for all files and the operating system.

When buying a Solid State Drive buyers need to make sure that it supports TRIM and garbage collection either out of the box or with a firmware update. TRIM and garbage collection ensure that the performance of the drive does not drop over time. This was a huge problem with first generation SSDs.

Hard drives come with speeds of 5400 and 7200. The former are more quiet while the latter are faster. A user who only works with light applications could consider buying a 5400 rpm drive whereas gamers or users with high end applications should buy a 7200 rpm drive.

The best combination at this point in time is to use a SSD as the boot drive and a 5400 rpm hard drive for storage.

Our Picks

• SSD: Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2M080G2R5 80 GB ($300)
• Hard Drive: Samsung EcoGreen F3 2000GB SATA II 32MB ($200)

The Intel X25-M is one of the fastest SSD when it comes to read speeds. The write speeds are usually lower in benchmarks but better in real life situations. It also offers 80 Gigabytes instead of 64 Gigabytes that most SSDs offer in that price range. It supports both TRIM and garbage collection.

The Samsung EcoGreen F3 is a drive with a speed of 5400. It has slower access and read speeds but offers 2 Terabytes of storage space. It is used to store everything but the most important applications, games and the operating system.

Build your own PC: Video Card

Selecting the right video cards usually depend on the level of gaming activity on the PC. We currently would suggest to buy an Ati Radeon 5000er video card as it is the only video card series currently supporting DirectX 11.

Gamers need to look at the Radeon 5850 or 5870 video cards for optimal performance. The selection here again depends on the budget. The Radeon 5870 retails for about $400, the 5850 for about $300. The 5870 is the faster card of the two and manages to beat the 5750 by 10fps+ in all benchmarks. Both cards can be used to play all modern games just fine.

Casual gamers might want to take a look at the ATI Radeon 5770 video card instead which retails for about $180.

Our Picks:

• High End Gaming: Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X ($440)
• Mid Level Gaming: ASUS EAH5850/2DIS/1GD5 Radeon HD 5850 ($300)
• Casual / No Gaming: POWERCOLOR PCS+ AX5770 ($170)

Our PC System:

Case: Lian Li PC-8NB ($100)
PSU: Enermax Modu 87+ 700W ($200)
CPU: Intel Core i7-860 ($300)
CPU Cooler: Prolimatech Megahalems Rev.B CPU Cooler ($60), 120mm fan, for example be quiet Silent Wings USC (BL013) ($20)
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-P55-USB3 ($120)
RAM: CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 ($270)
Hard Drive 1: SSD: Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2M080G2R5 80 GB ($300)
Hard Drive 2: Samsung EcoGreen F3 2000GB SATA II 32MB ($200)
Video Card: High End Gaming: Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X ($440)

Some components have not been discussed yet. This includes optical drives, keyboard, computer mouse, monitor, printer, sound adapter, network cards and other peripherals.

The concept of ZumoDrive is to move the data to a server on the Internet. The data is accessible like any other local folder on the computer or electronic device which makes it interesting for various things like hosting the music collection online. Local software like iTunes acts like the data would be local content.

The online storage provider ZumoDrive uses an algorithm to sync popular documents with the local device so that the data is available even in situations without Internet connection.

ZumoDrive keeps track of edited files providing access to older versions of the same file. It also makes use of a trashcan that can be used to recover – or permanently delete – files. Both of these options are available when logging into the homepage of the service.

The service is offering 1 Gigabyte of free storage space with the option for paid upgrades. An upgrade to 10 Gigabytes of storage space for example costs $2.99 per month.

ZumoDrive is currently in private beta available for Windows and Macintosh. Versions for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android plattform will be released soon. You need to enter an invitation code. The following one was provided by Techcrunch and is working at the moment.

At current status, my hard drive is sufficient for my needs. Of course I keep transferring files to a CD or DVD every now and then so you could say I haven’t really tested the limits of my drive yet. Then today I read a news article that said that hard drive manufacturer is going to introduce a Barracuda hard drive with a capacity of 1.5 Terabytes (TB). That’s 1.5 trillion bytes of data all in one disk. The disk should be available by August.

I must confess the idea of a disk that can hold that much data in it is a little beyond my comprehension at present. I tried to calculate how many movies I could fit at 700 MB a file but came up short. It will definitely be a big number. Still, if I put together my entire multimedia collection, I’m sure it’s close to that number so it’s not that inconceivable in terms of size.

The primary advantage is the expanded storage so no more running to put things on CD because you’re running out of space. At least not for a while. An added benefit of this hard drive is that it will obviously make the lesser capacity models cheaper so if you’re planning to buy a new hard drive, I’d suggest you wait for a month or two.

The biggest disadvantage of such a huge capacity is the sheer amount of data you would lose if your drive crashed. Still, as long as you do regular backups, you should be safe. What I’m curious to know is just what you would do with a 1.5 Terabyte hard drive? Store music, movies, games, software or something else? Let me know.

I’m not able to test the service yet because my country is not yet in the list of supported countries. The maximum file size seems to be 50 Megabytes which should be enough for most users if you consider that the file size limit is 20 Megabytes at Gmail for instance.

Windows Live Sky Drive is firmly integrated into several other Live services of Microsoft. Live Messenger users are for example notified if one of their contacts added a new file to their list of shared files.

It would be nice if someone who is able to join the service would comment on his experience with it.

Most users will probably be happy with the four Gigabytes and can use a small software called GMail Drive to add the Gmail storage as a drive in Windows. To do that the user needs to install GMail Drive and enter his login details when clicking on the new drive letter. I suggest to save this information unless you want to enter the username and password everytime you want to access the drive.

I mainly use it to backup important data, not as my primary backup location but a secondary one. All files that are stored on the drive are accessible on the Gmail website as well which means it is also possible to store files that you work with on different computers.

Read More:

Gmail Drive

Although it might look like a universal solution to finding a better way to handle digital data, this technology is probably supposed to be only used for permanent archiving of data, not rewriting (I’ve never found a single mention of rewritable discs on Mempile’s homepage) which rather limits it’s practical use. Also, when storing such a vast amount of data on a single medium, you could soon regret it if the disc got scratched or damaged in some other way. However, it’s still a great deal to have a medium with 1 TB capacity, even if not rewritable. Besides, in the future, when the technology develops even more, the capacity of TeraDiscs should eventually reach up to 5 TB.

This invention appears to be a nice breakthrough in 3D data storage technology but I’m still convinced that it’s only a necessary part of transition which I’m waiting for. I mean who wants to use discs that get easily damaged when not handled properly…

In my opinion, datacubes are to replace discs as we know them in the near future for the purpose of storing digital data 3-dimensionally. Does it sound too much like sci-fi ? Just like internet at the beginning of 19th century ?