Dell Precision T5400 (Late 2007) - Manual (Page 50)

50 Advanced Features
Intel RAID configuration program. If you have three drives and two are in a
RAID level 1 configuration, the third drive can be used as a spare drive for the
RAID configuration (see "Creating a Spare Hard Drive" on page 60). A RAID
level 5 array must be made up of three drives.
All drives must be the same type of drive; SAS and SATA drives cannot be
mixed in a RAID array. The drives should also be the same size to ensure that
the larger drive does not contain unallocated (and therefore unusable) space.
RAID Level 0
RAID level 0 uses a storage technique known as "data striping" to provide a high
data access rate. Data striping is a method of writing consecutive segments—or
stripes—of data sequentially across the physical drives to create a large virtual
drive. Data striping allows one of the drives to read data while the other drive is
searching for and reading the next block.
Another advantage of a RAID level 0 configuration is that it utilizes the full
capacities of the drives. If you have two 120-GB drives installed, you have 240
GB on which to store data.
NOTICE: Because RAID level 0 provides no data redundancy, if one drive fails, then
the data on the other drive is also inaccessible. Therefore, ensure that you perform
regular backups when you use a RAID level 0 configuration.
hard drive 1
segment 1
segment 3
segment 5
hard drive 2
segment 2
segment 4
segment 6
serial ATA RAID
configured for
RAID level 0