I want a setup which would give the best reliability and also increase speed perhaps. Some sort of raid/cloneing setup?
I have stacks of old hard drives that go unused , no money for ssd's , but tons of old drive lying around.
I would like the ability to still use the machine even if the main hdd fails , like have a cloned backup at any given point. No idea how this is even done. Also if both drive could be used to increase the speed that would be nice too.
RAID 1 will give you a mirror, so you have two disks and if one fails it keeps going. I don't think RAID 1 gives you any increase in performance. If you use more disks (3 or more) you could use RAID 5 which stripes the data across all the disks as well as parity data for redundancy, so one disk can fail and it keeps going. RAID 5 will improve performance, at least for reads.
The disks don't have to be the same size but they will be limited to the smallest disk.
There's also RAID 10 if your board supports it which is a mirror like RAID 1 but with two sets of RAID 0 disks, so you get mirroring and performance.
Is the speed increase enough to justify it? Or would a simple cloning program be a better option for me.
If you truly want speed plus reliability take look into raid 0+1, its a striped array that's mirrored so you get the speed of raid 0 with the mirror of raid 1. Its downside is it requires a minimum of 4 disks and the storage is 25% of the total. Which means if you have 4 1tb disks this will net you a usable 1 tb total
Personally I wouldn't bother with that, I'd just go raid 1 SSDs which is more then enough speed and reliability. Don't forget raid isn't a substitute for back ups, it's good to maintain important data on another storage medium too
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sometimes the best solution is saving up for better hardware, just throwing that out there.