Raid-0 [Data Striping] or Raid-1 [Data Mirroring]

[CeleryGoblin]

Which one of the two Raid confgurations will give me better performance with 2 WD Raptor WD360GD 36.7GB 8M Cache Hard Drives?

Thanks.

 

[Vybuni]

RAID 0 gives better performance, but comes with a greater risk. With RAID 0, if one of your hard drives fails, then you lose everything on both of them. RAID 1 will basically make two copies of everything, one on each of the hard drives.

 

[CeleryGoblin]

RAID 0 gives better performance, but comes with a greater risk. With RAID 0, if one of your hard drives fails, then you lose everything on both of them. RAID 1 will basically make two copies of everything, one on each of the hard drives.

Will RAID 1 give me any performance increase at all, or is it simply making two copies so you have a backup in case one of the hard drives fails?

I searched Google, and couldn't find an explanation of RAID, if anyone has a link that explains how the two work, it'd be much appreciated.

EDIT: D'oh , amazing what a change of keywords can do. I found an explanation, and it looks like RAID-0 will suit my needs the best.

 

[Vybuni]

http://www.acnc.com/raid.html
That site has a lot of good information on the different levels of RAID.

RAID 1 does not give any performance increase, but it does give increased security and data protection.

 

[Spartan]

with raptors, i would go with raid-0 but you should determine if the performance outweighs the risks

 

[Mark_Morgan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

wiki is the bomb!!!!

 

[septoid2]

I have a question too, sorry to hijack but I see you had your question answered.

What if I had two 250GB harddrives runing at RAID0, and I had another 250GB harddrive just there, so thats a total of 3 250GB HD's. Now, I want to make 2 of them RAID0, and of those 2 in RAID0, I want it to mirror all the information onto the one harddrive remaining, kinda like RAID1. Is this possible?

 

[Vybuni]

Yes, RAID is very flexible, but you need the proper RAID controller cards to implement certain levels. You could do a RAID 3 or 4. If you had 4 hard drives, then you could implement RAID 0+1. In your case, however, I think that RAID 5 would be the best. RAID 5 offers the ability to stripe the data over multiple discs and have parity blocks. Check out the link I posted, it shows all the levels of RAID and has benefits/disadvantages of each.

 

[Nitestick]

RAID 0, striping= double bandwidth because data is stored across 2 drives however if one fails all data in the array is lost
RAID 1, mirroring= second drive mirrors first giving you a redundant backup
RAID 0+1, mirroring and striping= like vybuni said requires 4 hdd's. will give double bandwidth and a redundant copy of information in case of failure. RAID 0+1 is easy to repair if a drive fails. however you only get half the storage available in the array for actual use. brilliant if you can live with the half storage thing and can afford 4 identical drives

 

[CeleryGoblin]

I'm still not clear on one thing, though.

Is RAID-0 more likely to fail than a single disk? Or do they have the same chance of failing?