RAID-0 with 2 x WDC Black 640gb

[marshalex]

I've got one of these in my rig already and am thinking about getting another one and having a RAID-0 setup with Win 7. Has anyone got any tips/tricks in getting this to run smoothly with win 7 or any tips and tricks for setting one up? Will the performance with 2 of these be pretty good?

[shbris]

raid is a false economy, just stick 'em separate and wait for ssd's to drop

[nightkhaos]

My advice is only use a RAID if you actually need that much storage in a single unit... my RAID 0 is used cause I can handle large raw 1080p video content, and my RAID 5 is there cause of the redundancy.

If you don't handle super-massive files (in excess of 20GiBs) or require Redundancy, as shbris said, it's a false economy. Not worth the hassle.

[marshalex]

My advice is only use a RAID if you actually need that much storage in a single unit... my RAID 0 is used cause I can handle large raw 1080p video content, and my RAID 5 is there cause of the redundancy.

If you don't handle super-massive files (in excess of 20GiBs) or require Redundancy, as shbris said, it's a false economy. Not worth the hassle.

in that case i mite just get one of the sammy F3's to use as a boot drive and use my old 500 gb WD and the 640 as storage unless anyone can recommend a good, reasonably priced drive. as much as i want an SSD its waaaaaaaaay out of my price range at this moment in time

[spoon_]

Worth mentioning that there is no redundancy on RAID0 so if one HDD goes nuts the whole array becomes unreadable/corrupted...

You will deffo notice increase in read speed.

[narz]

I just recently got the Samsung F3 502HJ for windows 7, its working great so far! ..Below is a comparison of my old 160Gb SATA and this new F3!

You can pick it up from scan @ £36


OLD 160GB SATA:



New 500GB F3

[marshalex]

impressive. i just put one in a build for my brother and was really impressed with how quick it was. have you got it setup in ACHI or IDE mode?

[narz]

Using IDE mode, ACHI performance increase isn't big AFAIK ...

but if you have tried it, i'd be interested to hear your resultss

[mac124]

2x 500gb F3's in raid0 set to 300gb partition, it only takes a few mins to set up these days hardly hassle really. End of the day its upto you as to whether its worth it.

[marshalex]

Well i understand the redundancy issue but if a hdd is going to fail its gonna take your data either way. Main thing i'm interested in is whether i'm going to see an increase in boot speeds and program access times. If its not going to be that noticable then i'll just get an f3 and use it as my boot drive. Does anyone know how the f3 compares to the wdc 640 black?

[nightkhaos]

Well i understand the redundancy issue but if a hdd is going to fail its gonna take your data either way. Main thing i'm interested in is whether i'm going to see an increase in boot speeds and program access times. If its not going to be that noticable then i'll just get an f3 and use it as my boot drive. Does anyone know how the f3 compares to the wdc 640 black?

RAID in general increases boot times. It is a myth that it makes it faster. This is because the system has to initate the RAID before it starts the Operating System. The 2 to 3 seconds you could save in Windows starting are lost in the 4 to 5 seconds the RAID takes to initate. Get an F3 man. You'll be way better off all around: more storage, faster access times... the only thing better on the market that is actually worth the effort is an SSD, but they are kinda small in capacity at the moment, which can be annoying.

[marshalex]

thanks for the advice. i'll probably pick an F3 up next time they're on offer on scan. hopefully the price of ssds will come down soon and the capacities go up as well

[Will404]

I just recently got the Samsung F3 502HJ for windows 7, its working great so far! ..Below is a comparison of my old 160Gb SATA and this new F3!

You can pick it up from scan @ £36


OLD 160GB SATA:

img

New 500GB F3

img

CPU usage at minus 1 percent is impressive

[narz]

CPU usage at minus 1 percent is impressive

lol .. no idea why thats showing incorrectly.... doesn't like the Q6600 maybe..

[watercooled]

Just wanted to give a bit of info on RAID, sorry if it's already been mentioned: as nightkhaos said it generally increases boot times and although it does increase read performance you won't notice unless you regularly copy large files off the array to another array with equally fast write performance ie in day-to-day use it's pretty pointless IMO because running programs etc doesn't involve this sort of drive access. Also with RAID 0 you get no redundancy - if one drive fails you lose everything and there's far less chance of getting data back off a RAID array than off a single corrupted HDD just so you know since a recovery program won't work with just one disk from the array (since the data is striped across the disks) and getting the other one to join the array would be a pain. People say you have twice as much chance of losing data in RAID 0, I'd personally say the risk is far greater...

[nightkhaos]

Just wanted to give a bit of info on RAID, sorry if it's already been mentioned: as nightkhaos said it generally increases boot times and although it does increase read performance you won't notice unless you regularly copy large files off the array to another array with equally fast write performance ie in day-to-day use it's pretty pointless IMO because running programs etc doesn't involve this sort of drive access. Also with RAID 0 you get no redundancy - if one drive fails you lose everything and there's far less chance of getting data back off a RAID array than off a single corrupted HDD just so you know since a recovery program won't work with just one disk from the array (since the data is striped across the disks) and getting the other one to join the array would be a pain. People say you have twice as much chance of losing data in RAID 0, I'd personally say the risk is far greater...

This is why I backup all important -- cannot ever lose -- data with online storage, put data that would be inconvient to lose (large files that take a long time to download) on my RAID 5 array, and then leave everything else (it's only the driver for my graphics card that I installed, I can get a new one next week // oh well I was planning to format Windows anyway) on my RAID 0 array.

I also do not like it when I see people who's only disk RAID 0, but they quickly learn their lesson. What strikes me as worse as people who have a RAID 1 disk as their primary disk and say "it's okay, it's all backed up" when in fact all they are doing is relying on the mirror to keep their data "secure" from loss.