Help me understand RAID
 

I have a single drive in my desktop and wanted to add two additional drives to store data setup in a RAID 1 configuration. Can I do this while continuing to use the original single drive or does it need to be part of the RAID setup?

You can have a main drive with your os on it only and not part of the raid. Then use the other drives as your raid, with raid1 the hd's have to be the same size and best to use hardware to control it rather than software. Really, prob best not to use raid on your pc, unless you spend the real money on a raid controller ($1000+), raid can be a real pain, drives, hardware, software, problems all over.

It's easier to just use the extra drives as mass storage devices and go with something like StorageProtect for your backups on a PC.

That program is pretty much like Acronis right?

No idea, here's a bump for you...

Ok, thanks for the info. :thumbsup

another solution is to buy a external raid drive like the Western Digital 2tb mirror edition.