This chapter will serve as an installation guide for the software that will be used to create a RAID array out of the partitions that you will create on your USB-connected drives. This storage array will then hold all your media files (pictures, videos, and audio) in one drive instead of being spread out over several drives.

For the basics of RAID systems, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID.

I don't want to discuss the basics because it is beyond the scope of this book, and other people have done a better job of explaining them than I can ever do. It is, however, important to understand that we will be building a "software" type of RAID array. There are two basic types of RAID arrays (not to be confused with modes, as in mode 0, mode 1, and so on).

The first type is called a hardware RAID, which as the name suggests, has specialized hardware that makes the array appear as one hard drive to the operating system.

The second...