I know Raid 1 is safer but I allways feel like I am wasting so much space when I use Raid 1 :(

I have everything backed up in this machine on my external drive and I use this machine for everyday use.. games and things like that.

I just don't know if its the disk that is phisicaly failing

With RAID0 there is no redundancy and one of the drives has a problem the RAID card cannot disable it and just use the other. Effectively to Windows your two disks are one big disk which is failing. RAID0 should only ever be used if disk speed is of ultimate importance and you have a strict backup regime. This is because whatever MTBF (mean time between failure) a single drive has the RAID array is twice as likely to fail as it needs both drives to work. RAID1 still has the same likelyhood of a drive failing but the system will still work with only one disk.

You could use disk diagnostic utilities to identify the individual drive then just replace one unit but you will stil need to re-instal Windows.

I can uderstand your concern, I started when disk sizes were only a few megabytes and extremely expensive (1GB raid drive=£1,300 in 1996) but with the capacity and cost of todays drives is it worth the hours and hassle of completely rebuilding a system for the sake of not having a true redundant storage system when you have the option available to you?

Remember Mirroring is not always the solution as corruptions would be written to both drives if the file system has a problem. I have 40+ systems running for 5 years now with mirrored drives and only two have been fixed by replacing one of the drives and rebuilding the mirror. 6 or 7 of them have had to be fully rebuilt due to damaged Windows system files which probaly would have happened mirrored or not. This shows that in 5 years out of in the region of 90 disk drives only two have failed.

Windows cannot see the two drives as separate entities, you have to be out of that to diagnose individual drives. Some RAID controllers have diagnostic facilities at the BIOS level and even have logs to record problems. Alternatively many drive manufacturers provide ISO boot CD images with drive diagnostics which will test the drives individually, just make sure you only do non-destructive read tests in the 1st instance. If these cannot find the problem then either there is a problem with the RAID controller or you are going to have to look at the destructive tests and re-install Windows. I must admit I am puzled that the system recovers itself from problems which does not in make sense if the drive is failing as a corrupted file cannot repair itself. I wonder if the problem is not actually a memory issue as these can produce some very odd results

Well I purchased two 1 terabyte disks. do you recomend me replacing mine with those and setting it up as Raid 1?

Absolutely, but as per the second paragraph in my last reply do not use the fact that you are using mirroring as a replacement for backups. It just means you are less likely to have a loss of data as it would not occur with a physical drive failure.

Alright, I'll give that a try, thanks for your time!