4 7200 drive in raid0

[ShoobieRat]

RAID 0 spreads the data evenly across all drives. It doesn't use them like a stack. If one drive goes down on a RAID-0 system, all the drives become useless and all the data is lost. You will have to reformat them and start over.

 

[Chankama]

Yup. Also, think of it this way. If you take your one single hard drive, and delete all the data in every other accessible memory location, the whole drive would become useless. Sure you'd have 1/2 the data, but out of context, it's meaningless.

 

[aj2003]

yea i understand about risks about it. thanks alot for you input guys.

what would you class as a good controller? would the nvidia or silicon image raid controllers on my motherboard be classes as "decent"

 

[Him]

I think any controller other than a generic one would be classified as decent.

As for the performance goes, since it does have to write the same amount of data to both drives, it would decrease performance because the process of the data being written has to be done twice.

If RAID 0 is hardly ever advisable, why was it invented? I mean, if you think about it, it really dosent serve any purpose at all. Well, actually, come ot think of it, it does make sense for two drives to act as one. It would make some things easier. Well, I guess i answered my own question on that one. I got RAID 0+1 setup, which offers a good deal of fault tolerance. I want to setup raid 5 though. That would be tight.

 

[dhw200]

RAID 0 is kinda pointless as far as im concerned. if u want redundancy, go for RAID 1. the data gets stored in both drives that way. in RAID 0, it just gets split in half.

 

[Chankama]

As for the performance goes, since it does have to write the same amount of data to both drives, it would decrease performance because the process of the data being written has to be done twice.

If RAID 0 is hardly ever advisable, why was it invented?

You are confusing Raid 0 with Raid 1. Raid 0 does NOT write the same data twice. In fact it provides no redundancy at all. It writes some data on drive1 and writes some other data of the big logical drive on drive2. So it should be faster during writes AND reads IMO. b/c both HDDs can equally take part of the IO operations. And what is the bottleneck usually? The HDD access. Well now we have 2.

Raid 1 requires info to be written twice. Writes are slower (write twice). But reads should be faster (2 places to get it from). All depends on how the controller works I guess.

 

[aj2003]

@him, thats not how raid0 works. it gets say 1mb had to be saved. In therory it would be split between the drives (say 4) so that each drive wrote their share, in this case 0.25mb which is obviously faster to write than 1mb. this should make transfer times 4x the speed for 4 disks 3 times for 3 and 2times for 2. BUT it doesnt work like that, as with dual cpus, sli or dual channel the increase in speed is only a small proportion of that.

my transfer rate increased from 70mb/s to 92mb/s by changingfrom one hard drive to two in raid0. Its for that reason raid0 is used.

Wat my original question was wat kind of transfer speed would i get with 4 drives in raid0 instead of my 2? and how would this effect loading windows and games etc?

 

[Him]

HAHA! Yeah, we never even answered your original questions. I honestly couldnt tell you about performance increases or decreases.

I dont know about you, but I always get RAID 0 and 1 mixed up right now. And while typing my last post, I did answer my own question so I guess that post can be ignored.

 

[dale5605]

RAID 0 decreases performance? WTF?!?

I got 2 hard drives running RAID 0 and they are faster than my 10,000 rpm drive. They would INCREASE performance shoobie, you need to learn what you are talking about.

On my RAID setup spyware scans go super-fast, things install lightning quick. Basically any reading/writing operations from the hard drives get's FASTER, yes FASTER, not slower.

I've never had a hard drive fail, you shouldn't worry about that imho.

 

[gaara]

The increase gained in RAID 0 is not really very substancial. It is faster, I have experience with it and I will give credit, but when you factor in the speed difference, along with the price as well as reliability, the cons start to outweigh the pros.

You would be better off just simply increasing rotation or cache size, RAID was built more for reliability than for speed.

Shoobie - Although I agree with what you're basically trying to say, I don't see how RAID 0 decreases speed performance. It will almost always result in speed increase, it's difficult for me to judge since I have two 10K drives in a RAID 0 to start, but I'm almost certain they have an edge over a single 10K drive.