Raid vs single HDD

[kevsoup]

im building at 1800-2000 dollar gaming rig in the upcoming months and im thinking about using 2 7200 drives in raid 0 because ive read its fast.

i really dont understand how its fast and what it does if someone could explain the advanatages of it to me that would be much apritioated

 

[hercules_upw]

Raid 0 enables your computer to use two drives as one. Basicaly, it writes data on both drives. part of a file stored on both disks. It's reffered to as stripping.

The major problem with RAID 0 is if one drive fails you lose all data. If you're going to have some sort of data that would be disaterous to lose, use RAID 0+1.

About the speed thing. I have two 80gig, 7200 RPM drives in RAID 0 and there is an improvement in speed. It's not a huge, dramatic increase, but it is noticeable.

Try this link. it will give an in depth explanation of pros and cons to allaspects of RAID.

Enjoy!

 

[lancec2c30]

ya,it just shares the data between the two hdd's. you have to use two of the same model and preferably same make for it to work.

 

[MrCoffee]

RAID 0 is risky I would recommend RAID 5 with 3 or more drives. RAID 5 with 4 drives is very very fast and you have your redundancy so its a simple matter of replacing a drive if it fails.. no data loss.

 

[Nitestick]

i agree with MrCoffee. RAID 0+1 is a very costly configuration. RAID5 still gives redundancy but greater speed and more storage.

 

[synergy]

Someone once explained it as two people doing the work that one would normally do...thus the job gets done faster. I have noticed a little bit of speed increase when loading games and booting into windows, but that is it and it isn't that much faster. As far as the riskiness of RAID 0, it doens't matter if you have your data store on yet another drive like I do. Also, I reformat regularly because of the beauty of the Windows OS...*rolls eyes* so losing OS data isn't really an issue. I guess it depends on your preferences.

 

[Nitestick]

I have noticed a little bit of speed increase when loading games and booting into windows, but that is it and it isn't that much faster.

did you stop to think that in those instances performance might not be limited by HDD ? if it's a hardware array and you're using a high disk bandwidth application, trust me it's noticeable.

 

[saltynay]

the seagate Barracuda 7200.10 series is the best price/performance raid array you can buy they have tons of space and are quick as a single hdd but in a raid 1 they're nearly as fast as raptors which are 3 times the price

 

[synergy]

did you stop to think that in those instances performance might not be limited by HDD ? if it's a hardware array and you're using a high disk bandwidth application, trust me it's noticeable.

Yea...maybe I am just used to the faster speed

the seagate Barracuda 7200.10 series is the best price/performance raid array you can buy they have tons of space and are quick as a single hdd but in a raid 1 they're nearly as fast as raptors which are 3 times the price

I read some benchmarks before I bought my drives and it's true that the Cudas are almost as fast as the older Raptors (36gb) but the newer Raptors have quite a bit more speed than the Cudas.

 

[korky122]

if you have 2 80 gig hd's in raid 0 will the total hd size be 80 or 160.