Raid 0 question

I just got my new HDD from Dell today and was excited til I opened the box. I was getting ready to image/raid the current drive with the new one and found something that may be a bit of a setback. My current drive is a 7200.4 Seagate 500gb the new one is a 7200.4 Toshiba 500gb. My question is can I raid these two drives as they are the same general specs/size/etc, or do they have to be the EXACT same drive to run raid? Thanks!

 

As long as they are the same size and speed they will run fine.
Infact even if they werent the same they would still run in raid but you only get double the storage of the lowest size drive and the speed is also determined by the slowest drive.
So yes they will run fine.

 

are you absolutely sure you want to go with RAID0?
The advantages are very minimal (maybe 10 percent performance boost over a single drive) while the main disadvantage is that you multiply the change of loosing all your data

 

Is it really only 10%? That's horrible. Where did you find this number?

 

i did the test myself, but it was a while back and i don't have screenshots right now.. sorry...

 

you must have done it wrong..

Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB SATA 2.5 Review Page 7 - Testing: ATTO Disk Benchmark - Overclockers Club


because I get 50-70% increases across the board.



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in case you're too lazy to look:

RAID 7200.4: Read/write
64 173/176
512 172/176
2M 156/160
8M 159/157

Single 7200.4
64 102/85
512 102/85
2M 103/85
8M 102/82

and here's one with a full ATTO report
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/967/7/
single 7200.4
4k 4120/3919
RAID 7200.4
4K 25991/37699

 

I dont know the single drive speeds but here is my raid o ssd setup.

 

Yes, a properly done RAID 0 is twice the speeds (read and write) of a single drive setup. That is the advantage. The disadvantage is the risk of losing the whole thing due to a single drive failure. With SSD's, the likelihood of that is much less than that of mechanical HDD's.

 

put that RAID 0 SSD filth away! There are children in these forums!

 

Thanks guys, I think those are good enough increases in speed to be worth it until I can get an ssd or two, unless someone has some uber cheap ssd's laying around then by all means! Two more questions, does anybody know if its possible to do a direct image of a raid setup to be transferred back to the drives in the event of a problem? And can anyone tell me if there's anything to setting it up other than set raid in bios, format, clean install? Thanks again guys.

 

If one HDD fails in a RAID 0 array, all data is lost. HDD's failures are rare, however you have twice the change in a RAID 0 array of failure. That being said, I've never had one of my drives fail on me. I still backup all my data however..

 

Yes, you can image a RAID setup and image it back to new drives if you need to. If you are using SSD's, it's a bit more complicated because you need aligned partitions before you image back since I don't know if any imaging software that automatically creates aligned partitions. But, basically, you can image and restore a RAID'ed volume.

 

He's asking if you have a problem with a Drive in the RAID if you can recover it. The answer is NO you can not. You can only image a Healthy RAID 0 array. If one of the drives fail, you can not recover the data by conventional means.

 

That's not how I read his question. He asks if he can image a RAID setup, not a single drive of a RAID set, in case a drive fails, and he has to start from scratch. I don't see where he references a single drive or recovering just a single drive. But, maybe he can rephrase how he meant it.

 

The last part?

 

I'm. Talking about making an exact image of the set that can be imaged back onto new drives in the event the original set has problems.

 

I guess I read him right.

 

looks that way.