Installing NT

I need to install Windows NT in a computer and I want to know which are the diffrerences between NTFS and FAT.
What is SAI?. and RAID?.
Also, I want to know which is the utility of a mirror drive.

Thank you very much.

Nauj

[Garkin]

NTFS incorporates security and can have up to a 4GB boot partition under NT. It is not compatible with other OS types (without special drivers from third parties), though.

FAT16 allows multiple boot types (for dual boot to Win 95/98) but it does not have security (file access and user permissions) and can only be up to 2 GB in size.

FAT32 is not supported under NT (but it is under Windows 2000). It is similar to FAT16 but uses disk space more efficiently and can have partitions larger than 2GB.

RAID is Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (usually - some people say Redundant Array of Independent Disks, but they're rewriting history to make the acronym sound better) and supports many standards of combining multiple disks to increase speed and/or reliability.

RAID level 1 is mirroring. This is the process of taking two disks of the same size (and usually same model) and using one normally and the other as a backup that has a duplicate of all of the information that was stored on the first.

The benefit of this is that either drive can fail and the data is not lost. There is, of course, additional overhead involved in issuing two writes every time that data is saved.

Other levels of RAID include level 0 (striping), level 3 (striping with a dedicated parity drive), and level 5 (striping with distibuted parity).

If you want specifics on most computer terms, try http://www.whatis.com/ - they're pretty good.

[Rick Leinecker]

Good answers with one clarification.

NT doesn't support RAID level 3. What you describe as RAID level 3 is really RAID level 5. It has a single parity drive.

Right now, NT doesn't support distributed parity.