To Raid or not to Raid

[WWS]

I have 2 250Gb hard drives, and was wondering if I should set them up in Raid 0 or not.

Is there any advantage to set them up in Raid 0??

 

[The Kraut]

I beleive but i could be wrong, that in RAID0 both drives are setup and act as one and the data is split between the two. This makes it faster but in the event that one drive fails the other one fails and all your data is gone. So unless your planning on having harddrive failures, dont go with RAID0.

 

[Chankama]

RAID 0 is faster. But, less reliable. The expected time before at least 1 drive out of M drives failing is less than the expected life time of one of the single drives.

I don't play BF2. The only serious game I've played on my system is Doom 3. And it just runs fine .. I have a single 7200 rpm drive.

 

[HAVOC]

RAID 0 only provides a small boost in performance. Like in copying and transfering files in folders. But, RAID 0 isn't really ment for performance.

Random Array of Inexpensive Disks.
LEVEL 0

You want a new 500GIG HDD. But the cost is around $330 USD.

So you buy (2) 250GIG HDD's for $105 USD and configure them in RAID 0. Now you have your 500GIG's for over $100 less.

That's were RAID 0 has it's advantages.

 

[alsyed]

RAID is actually Redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks.

RAID 0 is a misnomer due to the fact that there is no redundancy. With a great raid controller, you can get very good performance increases. I'd say go for it, as long as you use this array for projects, and not backups. Have another single drive backup of all your stuff, because as has been said, the failure rate is increased with raid-0

 

[Running]

if everything is running fine and your comp runs decent dont raid them since you might lose all your data if one drive fails like Chankama said

 

[Chankama]

RAID 0 only provides a small boost in performance. Like in copying and transfering files in folders. But, RAID 0 isn't really ment for performance.

It is actually. That is the theoretical reason behind "RAID" 0. Obviously, the activities you are involved in plays a huge performance in the performance gain. The idea behind RAID 0 is to give multiple HDDs the ability to do simultaneous work when processing data. At the "most", the performance gain will be Mx(the performance of a single drive) - where M is the # of drives in the RAID 0 array.

But, this never really occurs - unless you build a test case just to produce this scenario. In a 2 drive array, if one HDD is performing an operation, a random read/write request has only a 50% chance of hitting the unused HDD. A sequential request (such as copying a file) will be better organized such that both HDDs are working simultaneously.

Anyways, the price can obviously be used to justify a RAID array. But, this wasn't the motivation behind designing it. This "price" scenario is only really useful when you are talking about the "premium capacity" HDDs. e.g. the highest capacity drives. In other instances, it is of no use - wrt price. For eample, getting 2x80GB drives is more expensive than getting a 160 GB drive.