Raid-0 it is worth it?

[biggy7]

im about to upgrade my windows drive and i was thinking of going Raid0

ive already ordered 1x 640gb WD drive (WD6400AAKS) and will order another one if i decide to go raid

my question is, is it really worth it? would i see noticeable speed increases? im only interested in speed increases and not fault tolerance.

or should i just stick with the one drive?

[Technogeek]

Well.. it is slightly faster at installing software, loading files and so on but it has the disadvantage of if one hard drive breaks down you loose it all.

You also need a floppy drive to load the drivers for Raid.

I have a Raid0 array and I'm very happy with it. on my XP 64 bit OS

[comatose]

Hi, I currently have setup you're proposing (2 x 640 wds) in RAID 0. I noticed a big speed increase in certain specific tasks such as muxing/demuxing a video file, or copying etc. but typically on large files. There was a slight increase in speed loading certain games - again though this would be more obvious on games with bigger maps for example.

For day-to-day tasks, though it's hard to justify (unless you do a lot of the above of course), RAID 0 can even be slower if working with a lot of small files, so on reflection I don't think it's worth the extra for the infrequent benefits I get from it, but I guess if you're keen to try it out then you'll do it anyway out of curiosity - like I did

If you decide to go ahead, make sure you're prepared to do regular backups as you're effectively twice as likely to loose all your data through drive failure.

[s3ds]

As the posts above it depends on what you are doing with your PC personaly i only ever use raid 1 but it suits my useage
A good link on raid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

[Agent]

It purely depends on your usage - home user, certainly not.

I do use RAID0, but a lot of the work I do benefits from the increased IO from the disk.

[losimagic]

On the flipside, I sadly used Raid0 in my system I built about 5 years ago. It died 4 weeks ago and I lost everything. I knew the risks, but I was one of those people who just said 'It won't happen to me' so I never backed anything up. Lost about 6 years worth of photos which made me pretty sad

[Agent]

The same could have happened with a single disk - without a backup procedure in place, it makes no difference if its one drive in a RAID0 array thats died, or a single one.

I stick to two small drives, this way I can take a complete image of its contents with Acronis under well under 10 mins. Currently my RAID0 array is 320gig, with several 500GB drives for backup and other stuff

[Webby]

Yeah but if the chances of a single disk failing is 10%, then the chances of a single disk in a 2 disk array failing is 20% so you have doubled your failure rate, of course the chance of both of them failing is only 1% (but that is where Raid 1 comes in).

Of course you should still always back up, in fact having 2 backups makes a lot of sense.

Oh and obviously my failure percentages are complete farce, I admit it I made them up

[Hawker1986]

Well speaking from personal experience, ive got two computers with RAID 0 arrays and when I made the change I noticed a difference in boot and load times and also large file transfers, if your content with the risks then i would say go for it. Just make sure to keep a backup of important files, but then I would say that about just one drive too :S.

Hawker

[dangel]

I've used RAID 0 for years tbh and it's definitely useful to me. All I do is backup everything, incrementally, with Acronis TI to a third drive once a week (or so) for peace of mind (i just set it to turn off once done leave it to it). That way I can have a history of backups (TI compresses using all four cores very well) in case of software failure as well as hardware failure. Drive space is cheap, so why not?

[EndlessWaves]

Yeah but if the chances of a single disk failing is 10%, then the chances of a single disk in a 2 disk array failing is 20% so you have doubled your failure rate, of course the chance of both of them failing is only 1% (but that is where Raid 1 comes in).

Of course you should still always back up, in fact having 2 backups makes a lot of sense.

Oh and obviously my failure percentages are complete farce, I admit it I made them up

Compared with a single disk RAID 0 does have twice the chance of failing.

Compared with two disks RAID 0 has exactly the same reliability, but you need to restore up to twice as much from backup when a disk does fail.

Hard drives in general are very unreliable and you'll almost certainly have one fail on you within the next ten years so you should definitely make backups.


I think RAID 0 is worth considering is cases where two half capacity disks are the same cost as a large capacity disk, e.g. 2x500GB instead of 1x1TB are worth looking at, but if you're happy with your current capacity I wouldn't spend more money unless you need the extra transfer speed.

[Blitzen]

You also need a floppy drive to load the drivers for Raid.

No you dont. It depends on what motherboard and OS you are using.

I RAID 0 2 x 500GB Samsung Spinpoints and have a third drive to back up to once a month.
Never had an issue and it is certainly nippier than when i used a single drive. (Especially loading games up)

[dangel]

No you dont. It depends on what motherboard and OS you are using.

Choices are (for Windows):

XP:
- too stupid understand CDs, hard drives or USB keys so..
1. integrate the drivers into your XP CD with nlite
2. use a floppy disk

Vista:
- use vlite, a usb key, a cd, a dvd or another partition to give it the drivers *IF* it doesn't already see your RAID.

Just anothe reason to abandon XP

[Webby]

Compared with a single disk RAID 0 does have twice the chance of failing.

Compared with two disks RAID 0 has exactly the same reliability, but you need to restore up to twice as much from backup when a disk does fail.

Hard drives in general are very unreliable and you'll almost certainly have one fail on you within the next ten years so you should definitely make backups.


I think RAID 0 is worth considering is cases where two half capacity disks are the same cost as a large capacity disk, e.g. 2x500GB instead of 1x1TB are worth looking at, but if you're happy with your current capacity I wouldn't spend more money unless you need the extra transfer speed.

Yes if you have 2 drives then the chances of one of them failing are the same as one drive in a raid 0 array failing, the problem is if 1 disk fails in a 2 single disk set up you loose the data on that single disk if one disk in a raid 0 fails you loose the data on both disks. So from a single disk verses raid 0 set up (which may as well be a single disk in terms of data lose) you are twice as likely to have the raid 0 fail as the single disk. With proper back ups this is not an issue, apart from the time required to sort it all out if it goes pear shaped.

[shaithis]

Raid 0 is a lot more then double the risk of data loss IMO

There are plenty of ways to recover data from a multitude of different types of drive failures, the chances any of those will work at all to your benefit when the drive is part of a raid, is slim to zero.

[baius]

Just anothe reason to abandon XP

Wow, despite liking Vista, I also used to like XP, and have never heard of compelling reasons to "abondon" XP before reading your post.

Oh, and I wouldn't call DX10 a "reason" to upgrade to Vista - it's more like a forcing of the hand. (I regret that it's not patched into XP.)