To RAID or not to RAID...

[BennyV04988]

Hey, I'm going to be building a new pc in a few months and I'm concerned about HDD's...Is it worth it to RAID 0 two 160GB HDD's together or better to simply buy one 320GB HDD? I have been told that RAID 0 is a not as reliable but is essentially, twice as fast as a conventional drive setup. So is it really worth the risk? If the performance gain is high than I'd say it is, but I'm not familiar with RAID setups at all.


Oh ya, if i want to RAID 0 two drives, do I need a RAID controller Card or will an ASUS Premium SLi MOBO work fine?

 

[BennyV04988]

....come on people...

 

[Ridlyn]

buy two 160gb and dont use RAID 0

 

[kahlos]

RAID 0 gives a 45% performence increase. You will only really notice a difference if the parts for the rest of the computer are high grade. So if you have summin like a AMD X2 3800 with a 7800GT graphics u may find a speed increase. You also get the increased capacity. I my self are just diciding wether or not to get RAID and i think i will. You probably won't need a RAID controler as most motherboards come with RAID now just check the site of your motherboard and it should say. If your worried about the loss of data then you can try someother RAID's that increase the speed like RAID 0 but you lose some space but you do get a backup. I don't see the point really as hard drives don't fail very often and if they do then you could easily have backups of things on DVD's.

So to summerise get RAID 0 for extra speed and space. You can always try differen't RAID setups if your worried about data loss. But you don't increase any risk's of drive failure it's just if 1 drive fails you lose the lot as the data is striped across both drives. I would get 2 8mb cache 160GB hard drives and run em in RAID 0 that would give you the speed of a 16mb cache Raptor drive and 320GB space for alot cheaper.

 

[cedjunior]

Personally I wouldn't do a RAID 0 Array, but I'm sure for every person who's ever had one fail, there are 100,000 people who never had a problem. If you're really worried, save up some more money and do a RAID 0 + 1 Array. Also, no you dont need a seperate RAID controller card with that motherboard, if its a SATA mobo it will have it built in.

 

[BennyV04988]

Huh...ya i do plan to run an AMD 64 4000 and a 7800GT so i think i like the idea of RAID 0. and like you said dvd back-ups. Thats a ton of DVD but oh well. Im not too paranoid. It really comes down to $$$ to be honest. 45% increase worth the extra 50 bucks? I'll have to think it over more. My biggest problem will be getting my 60gigs worth of crap from this pc to my new one....considering they'll be in raid.

 

[gurusan]

i decided to do a raid 0 setup with my 2 160gb SATA seagate hard drives. I've never heard of there being "a risk".

 

[Effex]

you could do raid 0 with whatever then buy something like a secondary 250gb which is only around $100 or a 320gb. buy some backup software and do incremental backups onto it. it would be cheaper and be less of a hassle

 

[BennyV04988]

oh just for back ups? i see. who knows. I looked up raid 0 "reviews" if you will and the performance increase doesn't seem very large. I'm not sure if its worth the extra $. oh ya, whats the diff between ATA100,133,150, S ATA as far as performance

 

[HAVOC]

I don't think it's 45% increase in performance. But, I could be wrong.

The only way i'd recommend RAID 0 would be for Additonal Storage. EXAMPLE:

2 - 400G SATA Seagates for $160 a pop = $320 for 800G
2 - 300G SATA Seagates for $140 a pop = $280 for 600G
2 - 250G SATA Seagates for $102 a pop = $204 for 500G

1 - 500G SATA Seagate will cost you $340

REDUNDANT ARRAY OF INEXPENSIVE DISKS...