How to Set Up RAID on Your PC..Boost your hard-drive performance, add redundancy, or do both by converting your PC to use a RAID setup.

Configuring two or more hard drives in a RAID setup can speed up hard-drive performance and provide automatic protection against data loss from a drive failure. RAID used to be expensive, hard to implement, and limited to businesses with dedicated IT departments, but now even the motherboards on most budget PCs support it, making RAID easier to install and well within the price range of most tech-savvy PC users.

Note: After reading this article, watch our video for a visual tutorial on setting up RAID.

What level of RAID do I want?
RAID comes in a number of flavors--or levels--that offer data protection, enhanced hard-drive performance, or both. In addition to the seven core levels of RAID (RAID 0 through RAID 6), you'll encounter a slew of variants and combinations. Following are the RAID levels you'll find on affordable, consumer-level RAID adapters.Continue