Raid 0 vs No RAID

[Dimoe]

Hey, got a question, i'm probably going to buy an identical extra hard-disk so I can use the RAID 0 feature on me mobo.

The hard-drives involved are 2 x (Maxtor 40Gb 7200rpm ATA133)

Anyone know how much computer performance will increase with 2 hard-disks doing the work of one??? Where will I see the biggest performance increase???

Also, anyone know where I could out how big of a stripe size is good for my hard-disks?

 

[gonaads]

Check this out:

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel0-c.html

 

[Taurus]

raid-0 is somewhat risky. i had a stripe array once and after 4 months, it faulted and i lost everything. i would either get a seperate (3rd) hd to keep your OS on or run raid 0+1 which requires 4 harddrives.

raid-0 will give somewhat faster loading times in games and such, but not by much. i just don't think it's quite worth it. i might give it another try someday, though... once i get a big, slow, cheap, quiet harddrive to back everything up.

 

[shoulin]

hehe used raid-0 on ATA 100 with two 40gigs, never had a problem till one of the drives died... ehhh stuck with 1/2 of everyting sux!!

anyways on one 80gig now with no raid... though it is ATA 133 so i cant really compare both are fast

i dont really think raid 0 is worth it less u just care about benchmarking or running a server wich u sould be running raid 1 or 0+1

 

[Zedric]

I wouldn't suggest running RAID 0.

If you run a server you should run RAID 5 (min 3 disks).

 

[Dimoe]

Well, I think i'm still gonna go with raid 0 since all i keep all my important stuff on my pentium2 which i can access via my network. This comp is mainly for gaming.

Anyway, whats with everyone and using raid 1 and stuff. I current;y use ONE hard-drive, so why bother backing stuff up now, I want performance, performance, performance!!!

Every hard-drive i'v ever owned has never failed on me, so is there like a bigger chance of my hard-drives failing under raid 0??? And even if one of them did, I don't keep anything that important to me my Athlon XP 2100+.

I'm going to go buy the extra hard-drive tomorrow, i need the space anyways...

I'll post my comments on raid 0 vs no raid once I get everything up and running again. The main reason I started this thread is to hear what people had to say about performance gains from no raid to raid - 0 with 2 hard-drives. I would assume performance gains would be similar to that of adding extra ram, eg:stuff will load faster, etc...

 

[Taurus]

yeah, things will load faster, but not by much. and when i said i had an array and i lost everything, both of my harddrives were fine... it just takes one crash or premature shutdown to cause an error in the array and it will become inaccessible. you'll have to rebuild the array, reformat it, and reinstall everything.

but maybe you'll get lucky and it won't happen. so some before-and-after benchmarks though, and let us know how it goes.

 

[Zedric]

The chance of failure is double since there are two disks involved. Besides if something goes wrong, it goes horribly much more wrong than without RAID.