RAID worth it?

[HoldenBurn1000]

well I have heard a lot of people talkin about running there HDD's in RAID. What exactly do you gain from this? is it much faster? Any down sides?

What is needed? and how does it work? Do you still see two drives or only one?

Never done it before so a bit of advice needed :d

[BUFF]

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

Personally I decided that it wasn't worth the hassle for me but obviously other people's opinion varies.

[emul8]

The very first pc i built was set up with raid and i hav never looked back
Personaly would not have anything else in my pc I am currently running 4 WD Raptors in raid 0 and i get 345mbs burst speed and 200mbs read and write.
Some people say there is no benefit but how they come to that conclusion i dont know?

Windows and programs load faster system responce is better and winrar works better

How it works is have a look here http://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/neuffe...t_is_raid.html

[GoNz0]

i use raid 0, started off using it in software mode using windows disk managment, was impressed so built the new pc using 2 250gb maxtor maxline2 disks (longer life) and im impressed, windows boots fast and games load quick, normally 1st on the server when a new round starts

[Steve B]

but then the drawback of raid 0 is, if you lose one disk, you lose them all

[charleski]

I run a Raid-0 system, but TBH I'm not completely convinced that the increased sustained transfer rate makes up for the hassle I'd face if any of the disks failed. Raid-0 does nothing to speed up seek time, which is the largest speed hit on most general-use PCs. If you want to see the best speeds from a Raid-0 system you need to be careful about keeping your disk defragmented.

[GoNz0]

yep i had a drive crap out within the 1st week, raid 0+1 is the best of both worlds, but i just dump downloads and backups on my old 80gb just incase it drops the array again. raid 0 isnt that bad if you buy 2 smaller drives. offests the cost of one big one.

[Steve B]

im planning on buying a terabyte soon for my mini-itx freeNAS box (currently sitting with a whopping 40gig IDE drive) and am considering running 0+1 as theres going to be lots of sensitive data on it Starting off with a 16 quid sata card from dabs though, so itll be JBOD to start with

[Agent]

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=91668

Did a post on it a few days back

RAID0 has a use, without a doubt. Infact, its brilliant at whats it does, but its NOT for home desktop PC's.

[HoldenBurn1000]

Hmmm looks good but dont think Ill really benifit from it.

[Steve B]

good choice, stick with JBOD, its much easier. if you need to backup any stuff like media files, just make a regular copy of them to a different drive. That way you get some of the benefits of raid 1 without making the second drive redundant.

[CrazyMonkey]

Gonna go RAID 0 with 2 Barracuda's. Only down side i can see is that if one drive fails all drives in the RAID lose DATA. Apart from that all i can say is RAID seems great, and should improve speed.

[this_is_gav]

I'd only say it's worth it at all in a home environment if you 1) have a seperate data drive containing everything you need to keep, and/or 2) if you do a lot of hard drive intensive work, such as working with uncompressed videos or the likes.

Personally it annoys me when I go onto another PC and it's simply not very fast at loading things up. I could live without it easily enough, but it's very noticable.

There's a lot you need to work out before you go down the RAID0 route though. If you're not sure, don't do it.

[HoldenBurn1000]

thanks for all the help guys. looks like I will stick wiht what I have. The extra speed of RAID wont help me enough I think. Probably better for me just to stick with using othere drive for data back up and storage.

[Captain Fizz]

If you have the drives - RAID5 is great IMHO.
Using a controller card will always give better write speeds than a motherboard solution...
But even the on-board ones - The Read speeds are fantastic.
(There are a lot of large files being taken from my PC)

So for serving files, multiple files at once - RAID5 is highly recommended.

For OS/Games I have a single Raptor.

Have had RAID0 in the past - Defrag speeds are amazing!
(Like one minute per drive, maybe 3 for a large drive)
Good for game loading times - OS loading about the same.

If you are not sure if you need RAID - You probably don't need it.

[FirePhoenixCtk]

Its good for bf2 i think, 95% of the time im first on the map.