Hardly. A backup is thee to protect your data. Raid 1 protecty you from disc failure, but not from: * A defective ram writing crap to the disc * you or a virus deleting part of your data I had occasions where a bad software / hardware happily killed data - and no RAID would have helped recovering it. Use RAID what it is used for. I have great IO with 4-6 disc RAID 10's (have a couple of). On a 4 disc RAID 10 velociraptor I can copy files with 800mb / second, and have no problems booting multiple virtual machines despite 10 windows servers doing some crazy IO when they start On my new market data sql server I currently use 6 discs in a RAID 10, and the IO so far is awesome - need to make some measurements the weekend with SQLIO. Now my problem is the logs, which still are on a VHD file, but that goes soon on a RAID 1, too Note that all the RAID is not there to backup - backups are separate and go ona RAID 5 of 500mb discs (2.5" - all i use now). The RAID is there so that I et better IO (read performance database files - very important when doing some stuff) and to keep things working when a disc fails, so I get no downtime Note that all that is NOT, again, a backup. I would hate loosing some of the data. Not that I do not ahve the source data separate, but soon it would possibly take me weeks to load and preprocess them again (talking o f stored ticks streams, for example). Serious pain in the butt. As such, daily backups to on a RAID 5 running on a separate computer (!). The later part is important. Hardware failure sometimes are really - tricky. I don't want to risk anything. Personally I think we are there now with SSD's. Not for all, but soon for a lot. New firmware handles a lot of the slow down issues. And the cost is not that big if one can move from RAID 10 to RAID 5 and STILL get a hundred time more IO out of the game Not good enough for virtualization, but I can see a point for some database applications
One easy way to get a little more speed, if you have two discs, used to be to put the swap file on the D drive and make it large and fixed. I'm not sure that is still relevant.