Should I do RAID0?

I love the fact my G50v has dual disk enclosures and have been running 2 HDs for several months now. It's been great for dual booting into Linux, Win 7, etc.

I was hoping to get some thoughts on performance running 2 separate disks vs a RAID0 set. I realize that RAID0 will generally be the best option for performance, but hear me out.

My end goal is to run Win 7 as my base OS (for gaming and minimal apps installed) and then run VMware Workstation to run an XP session for work related stuff (email, office, VPNs, etc). Ideally nothing extraneous will be installed on the Win7 except for gaming stuff (games, video card drivers) as all the other "crap" I need for work tends to bog things down over time.

Will I be better suited to run my base OS on one HD and then my VM on the 2ndary HD, in theory separating IOs? Or just dump everything in a RAID0 set and go from there? Things tend to slow down more than I like if I am running a VM on a the same HD as the OS.

Any thoughts or insight would be much appreciated...

 

FWIW, I did some crude performance benchmarks on a RAID0 vs stock setup. There is very little difference in typical tasks, but there is a significant difference in games that load from one or two very large files (I doubt there would be a difference for games that use hundreds of small files).

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4582372

The one big disadvantage to RAID0 is that if something messes up, it will be very hard to retrieve your data since many recovery tools (at least the free or cheap ones) don't support RAID. For some reason my RAID array messed up one day and I had to redo everything...had most of my data backed up, but ended up having to play through 85% of Dead Space again (good game, so at least that was enjoyable).

 

Thanks for the info. I am definitely aware of the data risks of RAID0.

The performance you saw doesn't surprise me a whole lot and I am glad your tests could partially confirm that for me. I do wonder if a stripe size of 64k or 128k might work better. RAID controller performance usually has a lot to do with how much cache it has and I'm guessing these laptops have very little, if any, at all.

I think I will be better off running two separate disks rather than the possible headaches of the RAID set. Thanks again...

 

Bad idea on a laptop...the possibility of one drive going bad is high, and it would cause you to lose everything. There is a small performance increase for games with large map files, but that's about it.