Is RAID0 a good option?

Hi, i have just bought a 500GB HDD for my R2 and am thinking of using the RAID0 option, but im new on that, i just know that it may "optimize" or make it faster but i dont know...

Is it a good option or i should just let it as a slave disk?

 

RAID0 basically combines the speeds of two drives into one. You will have to reformat everything though. It is up to you whether you deem it to be necessary.

 

Yes, i know i must reformat my lap, but does the speed perfomance is that notable?

because i have heard that using RAID0 is "the best thing" but im not pretty sure so i want a second opinion.

 

the biggest knock on RAID 0 is that if one of your drives dies, you lose all your data.

however, it is much faster

 

For most intents and purposes, people cannot tell the difference with RAID 0. You will notice slightly faster boot up times and still should load faster, but you are also taking a gamble, as if 1 drive dies, you lose everything. Also with 2 drives, you also double your chance of failure.

 

oh! so that's how RAID0 performs?, i mean if one of my drive died, i will lose everything even in my second drive?

 

yes, that's how it works...because windows treats both drives as a single drive...when data is stored, you don't know where on each drive its stored. Data can be split for a single program across both drives so if you lose one, you lose everything

 

RAID 0 is striped. That means that when you write a file to the hard drive it is split up. Part of the file is written to one disk and part of it to the other disk. In theory, the operating system can finish the operation faster since it can write each half of the data package simultaneously which should be twice as fast as waiting on one drive to record the data. The down side is that if one drive dies, all you have left is half of every file which is useless. The upside is that reads and writes are faster.

With write back caching and other performance enhancing techniques used by Windows these days to make single drive operations faster, striping is not exactly twice as fast as regular writing but it is still faster.

I personally have no problem with my customers running in RAID 0 but ONLY if they routinely make good backups of their machine. If the machine doesn't routinely back up to an external disk, tape, or online service, RAID 0 is too risky. If a single drive starts having problems, a lot of times you can still at least copy the data off before it completely dies. A pair of RAID 0 drives is hard to make work correctly in another computer so you can rescue your data especially if one of the drives is having problems. It's faster but it's a little precarious. I personally don't run my machines that way because I'm not very disciplined about backing up.

 

This probably isn't what you want to hear, but you're better off having an SSD for OS and programs, games, etc., and then a large HDD for storage of music, movies, and that sort of thing. SSD speed will still destroy RAID0 HDD.

 

Yeah... I know about SSD speed, but im from méxico so a SSD worths about 500 Dls the 256GB so i think its not an option.

I have read what i wanted, im moving to RAID0, because i make a backup of every data i have once a week(External HDD).


Thanks a lot for your answers c:

 

hmm looks like i need an externals to backup
well yes it happens to me before, when my system just got broken, i thought the disk drive won't be a problem,
but once it's all back to normal, everything seems fine except my disk drive.. sadly..

and i never know how raid0 perform until i found this thread..

 

Yup Raid0 just splits the data to two drives, making operations faster but you also double the disk of data loss from disk failure. So unless you make daily backups, i wouldnt advise you use it.

RAID5 on the other hand will give you a speed increase with redundancy for a single disk failure...but it requires 3 disks minimum, and you lose capacity equal to one of the disks for parity data.

 

If redundancy is what you are after because of fear of drive failure then RAID 1 (mirroring) would probably be what you are looking for. It requires a minimum of 2 disks and you can survive the loss of 1 disk (assuming you are using only 2 disks). The down side is if you have 2 500GB drives running in RAID 1 you only have 500GB of space; you effectively lose one drive. But I don't know if these laptops even support it.

I have an old P4 box I built many, many years ago that runs 2 80GB drives in RAID 0 (yes that is how old it is -- 80GB drives were big!). It still runs just fine to this day. Drive failures happen but I have only experienced 2 across the many PC's, laptops I've owned or worked with (knocking on wood...).

RAID 5 works great if whatever you are doing is read intensive. You will suffer when it comes to writes because of the parity calculations (unless you have a SAN and can spread that across a whole lot of spindles ). I don't think there are any RAID 5 controllers for laptops however but could be wrong.

 

Great information Hokum! +1 Rep

Raid 0 and Raid 1 are both supported on the m17x's. Raid 5 however is not.

 

RAID 1 is excellent against drive failure, but if your OS gets corrupt or you get a really bad malware infection...both drives are now infected/screwed up. So it's not 100% bulletproof.

 

Correct. RAID 1 (or any RAID level with mirroring or redundancy) is only meant to protect against hardware failures; not malware, etc. Only backups will help you there. Thanks for adding that for clarification so as not to cause any confusion.

 

Can anyone link to some good benchmarks showing the difference between a single HDD and and two in RAID 0?

No SSD's please. If there's a consistent 30% increase or so in performance, i think I'll make the switch to RAID 0.

 

Synthetic benchmarks will be a bit of a misleading measure.You will get high figures but the increase in actual real life use is really only close to about 10%~ for most tasks.

Its mainly beneficial when working with large files.

 

My R2 only supports RAID0, and the mirror one is not an option, i only got 2 slots for HDD... About using an SSD as main and a HDD as Slave... Im thinking about it, i just went to a friends house who owns a SSD and his PC boot in less than 10 secs... Anyways, using RAID0 isnt that dangerous i think, i have used a DELL INSPIRON 1545 for about 3 or 4 years and the HDD has never get a problem... I think the data loss thing is a little bit peculiar to happen.

 

How difficult is it to "UN-RAID 0" a laptop lol. I am probably going to be picking up an m17x R2 tomorrow and it comes with 2 256GB SSD in RAID 0. I'm not so sure I would want to keep them configured like this...the laptop will be wiped clean and come only with Windows 7. So what exactly does this entail?

 

You will need to go into the bus controller/RAID menu on startup and select "delete array," I believe. Another clean install will be required as you will lose all the data on both hard drives.