Cant afford a SSD? Did you know that RAID 0 exists?

I read a blog today that tons of people are forgetting why RAID was created and there are still lots who don't know it even exists...

Just run 2, 7200rpm identical drives in RAID 0.

There are downsides of course to RAID. Especially RAID 0 (which is what we are talking about), i.e. if 1 of your hard drives breaks then your data is basically gone forever. This is why you need to of course keep backups of everything that is important. That is the case as well with SSD because it's hard to recover accidently deleted/lost data from a crash from a SSD.

With 2 supported generic hard drives running raid 0 you can achieve some pretty amazing speeds, very closely matching that of a SSD, not to mention you get to keep the perk of a larger storage space when compared to SSDs which are extremely expensive per GB.

Raid has a huge advantage of being very, very fast and having a ton of storage on hand. However there are of course downsides as well:
Not all hardware/systems support raid.
Tons of laptops don't have 2 hard drive bays and some motherboards aren't raid compatible etc. There is a longer list but you get the point.

So it's obvious that you have to prepare yourself for a raid 0 setup and have the right hardware. But it is worth it if you do a bit of research into the subject. SSD's have downsides too remember.

We also need to remember however that with Random Reads and such a SSD will always be faster. This, to many is what matters the most and will sway them to buy a SSD. But has the SSD put RAID 0 out of business? Definitely not. Not until SSDs offer a lower price per GB and keep the same performance will we probably see a complete extinction of RAID 0. Then again other forms of raid are fantastic and may not go extinct for a long time.

For many RAID 0 is plenty fast enough and for tons of gamers who like having a ton of very fast storage space. 2, 1Tb hard drives running a raid 0 with their favourite games is absolutely more than plenty to satisfy them. Especially without the need of having to purcase a SSD or external storage. It's a simple balanced solution of great speed and large storage space.

Though I feel I must mention the fact again that if 1 hard drive fails your data is pretty much toast.. backing up is important no matter what the situation this day and age.

There are lots of pros on the forums who can describe the topic better than I can, but I thought I would give this a shot. 2 quick 7200rpm drives or better running a raid 0 is a fantastic choice for anyone who wants speed and storage or even those who are just speed junkies.

Lastly I'll end with saying that running a Raid 0 Array isn't exactly 'cheap' but it can be a whole lot cheaper than buying a decent sized SSD.

For those who are thinking hmm.. do some research, you might be surprised.

 

The only problem is raiding a notebook

 

Which is a big problem considering the majority of notebooks don't support RAID in the chipset.

 

forget abou RAID 0. And it is not for notebook anyway.

 

Great for desktops though. Just not for notebooks. And if RAID 0 hard drives are fast, imagine RAID 0 SSD's. I saw a video on youtube of some guys putting 24 Samsung 470 256gb SSD's in RAID 0. They were able to open more than 50 applications (Adobe/MS office etc.) at once in less than 20 seconds.

link here: YouTube - Samsung SSD Awesomeness

 

Lol waleed786 that's funny, next we'll need higher refresh rates for our monitors or they'll be bottlenecking the computer hahaha!

As for raid in laptops it works if you are lucky enough to have 2 HDD bays.

 

Other than being as scratch disk, no one in their right mind should use RAID 0. RAID 0 over RAID 1 is fine. But you need 4 DISK to begin.

Beside, you are not going to see any gain for RAID 0 in a two drive situation being used as system drive.

 

Yep.The last time I ran a Raid setup was with 4 WD raptor 34gb in Raid0 with Nforce4 controller.It could move some big files fast but it doesnt come close to the response time a single ssd.

 

the nforce4 chip was modern, like 5 years ago...

SSDs are still faster than a raid setup, but for 1/4 the price its an excellent compromise...


I would love to raid the XT/hybrid drives just to see how it compares

 

RAID is possible with laptops which have at least 2 HDD bays, but it'll most likely be software RAID, which is not as effective as hardware RAID. Sure, it'll be faster than using a single drive, but you're better off setting it as RAID 1 once you weigh the gains and losses.

 

5 years in the computer world is OLD!!!

Its like 20 in car years.

Compare the NEW ZR-1 to the old 1990's ZR-1 about the same

 

RAID 0 is no comparison with an SSD for 4k file transfer and response time.

Also, who cares if you RAID 0 and lose a disk. If you don't have regular and redundant backups you're looking for trouble anyhow. RAID 1 protects against a faulty disk, but it doesn't protect against a crash to bad driver updates, virus, malware, or worm. It's duplicated. And this is more likely than a failed hard drive.

Just have a backup history and you'll be a happy camper.

 

It is not about whether you have backup but DOWN TIME. RAID 0 increase your potential down time chance by 100%. IOW, if your HDD has a failure rate or 2%, now it becomes 4%. Multiple that with the time you need to replace the drive and restore from backup, that is the time(and productivity) that would be lost.

RAID(other than 0) is a way to allow servers to reduce down time(by online swapping out the faulty device), not to protect data loss. Which is why in general RAID is not for desktop, let alone notebook.

 

Nonsense, from beginning to end. I happen to run a 2-drive matrix RAID configuration on my M6400, with a system volume in RAID0, and my data on a RAID1 volume. The system volume, in practice, indeed reaches speeds that come quite close to an SSD in some respects. So Zepti is right on with his post.

And two 500-gig Seagate XTs costing about 200 bucks versus someting like 2 grand for the same setup in SSD is worth considering...

 

'in some respects'

 

Yes, of course. But it's a lot more than "not going to see any gain". Nobody should believe for a minute that any RAID setup in a laptop (high-powered desktop RAID systems are another matter, however; those are expensive, too...) could match an SSD, which is why I added that qualification. However, benchmarks are one thing, practical experience another. It all depends on what you actually do on your computer. For my usage, I found the difference between an SSD versus my RAID setup minor, and the gain from RAID over a single-drive setup quite substantial. But again, somebody else may well feel quite different.

 

I feel like the 512Gb quad SSD setup on the Z1290X in RAID 0 is slow. Data is striped across four SSDs in parallel. Supposedly it's 6.2X faster than the typical 5400 rpm laptop hard disks. Just so you get an idea what to expect, 2 HDDs writing in parallel would be considerably slower.

 

If you want to talk corporate storage, then yeah. But we're all talking about personal storage, and not relevant to most laptops anyhow because RAID is really out of the question for most laptops.

But alas based on your last paragraph we are meaning the same thing.

 

I run three levels of disk storage in a Lenovo W700 laptop; works great, just plan out how you wanna run your apps:

1) Ramdrive for high speed stuff; smokes anything else out there

2) Moderate sized SSD for C: and generic stuff.

3) Conventional 1T HDD for archival, slower, lesser used stuff. W700 has enough room in it for one SSD and two of the 1T drives, so plenty of storage. Maxing out in this fashion(SSD + 1T + 1T) =~$300, which ain't bad, all things considered.

Cheap, faster than snot, -and- easy to setup and maintain. Raid 0, while not dead yet, is old tech, not to mention(as listed above) somewhat iffy on software/hardware/laptop implementation...and, the redundancy issue is something I don't wanna deal with in that fashion.

 

-> Not much use in a 13,3" laptop... additionally, RAID will still be dead slow compared to a SSD, especially on the important 4K reads/writes.

Additionally SSDs are shockproof - a rather valid attribute in a laptop.

 

Now all they need to do is get their butt in high gear with OLED's so we can have a truly durable laptop. Only moving part will be a fan.

 

-> The high end LED LCDs are pretty good too.

OLED is nice, but I hear the lifespan is rather low compared to LCD -> besides, isn't OLED old tech by now?

 

I used raid 0 , 2 hdd 7200 rpm , still slow compare to SSD.

 

He he hee, SSD's are not shock proof (just more so than HDD's).

 

Lifespan isn't that low, but they eat batteries. They have a significant power difference when displaying an all black desktop vs. a white one, and that makes mobile use a little dodgy.

I also think they've had some issues making them full-size at reasonable prices.

 

Well nothing is truly shockproof. Atoms aren't even shock proof with enough energy put behind it. But compared with a hard drive with spinning discs and an arm sitting less than a mm above its surface, I'd say SSD's are significantly moreso.

Seems odd that something with a large backlight consumes less power than something that provides it's own illumination.

 

Depends on your requirements. Disks with free-fall sensors (or disks installed in systems that provide their own free-fall sensors, like Dell's M4500) can survive up to 1000g. That's a lot. But, yes, an SSD would typically survive even higher accelerations. Not sure what the limits are, or if they even publish them.

 

lol @ even thinking about RAID 0. Okay so your read/write speeds are doubled, but ruh roh 1 drive dies and you are boned. Consumer RAID is a joke, especially people who use on board RAID. You get a nice PCI-e RAID card. RAID should only be for large corporations.

 

the moment they die from shock, most likely the rest of your laptop is already garbage.


and to the op. raid0 is nothing compared to an ssd. raid can't make your system more snappy. i replaced a raid0 in a desktop with an ssd. night and day. (i had to, after my tiny 12" ultralowvoltage laptop (2x1.2ghz) was faster thanks to the ssd than the quadcore big tower with raid0 that i had.

problem is, those disk sensors still happen to fail on short, low power strokes. happened to me twice. yes, you can throw the laptop in the air and catch it, no harm. but a simple drop to the table with a tiny rotation and a distance of only 3-4mm can still kill it, as sometimes, it just doesn't react the moment where the head already cuts into the disk. and you don't want it to actually alarm-and-get-the-head-back the moment it cuts the disk already. much bigger cut, then.

 

Uhmm, guess what, the same thing is true for a single-drive setup. So, yeah, the probability of failure of a RAID0 array is twice as high, but how high is that? I have never had a drive fail on me during the time I used it. Besides, ever heard of the word "backup"? Of course, as I have explained before, I wouldn't trust my original data to a RAID0 array; those are on RAID1

You know, I have been quite happy with this joke so far. But then I know how to use a computer. For the average dolt it may indeed not be the best of ideas...

 

-> I broke one HDD in my first laptop after 1 year... the second died after another year and the third is in a bad state too (that's definitely my fault though)

The HDD I had in my Vaio also received some bad sectors before I switched to a SSD even though it had a freefall sensor integrated into the laptop.

i.e. breaking a HDD is easy - especially on a laptop.

 

Heh, looking at your record above, maybe it's just easy if you're a klutz
All I can say that I haven't lost a hard drive on any of my personal laptops, ever. That's roughly a dozen laptops total over more than ten years. But your mileage may vary, as they say.

 

Correct, but if a single drive fails there is a possibility of recovering data. If a RAID 0 drive fails it is significantly harder to recover data (if not impossible).

Sure I've never had a hard drive fail on me either but we get AT LEAST 2-3 people a day who don't back up their data and their drive dies.

RAID 1 is NOT backup. It is for data redundancy. If drive A gets virus, drive B gets virus too. Same goes with fried partition table, OS corruption. Ruh roh your backup drive has the same issues the original drive. RAID 1 is only really good for a drive failure.

I never said you didn't know how to use a computer. However consumers seem to have this notion that RAID is the next best thing since sliced bread, and I'm going to tell you only .00001% of non-corporate customers actually NEED RAID.

 

-> Alternatively, it depends on how much you travel with your drive.
And if the drive just dies -> i.e. possibly electronics dead, I don't think that's my fault

 

Poor man`s SSD?

 

The problem is between dark and light. It's much more efficient displaying black, but much less so displaying white. My phone has an AMOLED, and a dark theme gives me noticeably longer battery life. But I'm done taking this thread off-topic

Exactly. I find RAID5 a great idea for my media center array, because media files really can't get infected with anything, and I want them protected against drive failure when I've got 3TB of storage space. It won't protect me against accidentally deleting everything, but that's a risk I'm willing to take because with multiplying my drives for storage I'm multiplying my chance of failure, and RAID is simply a way to mitigate that.

RAID is best for storage arrays, or RAID0 for performance if you keep things backed up well and have a recovery plan. Honestly, my best recommendation (especially if you're on a budget) is to have a good external drive or web space that you back up your critical, irreplaceable files to. Family pictures, home video, personal documents, things like that. Everything else can be reinstalled

 

True everything can be reinstalled, but things with product keys, especially Adobe, any Microsoft product can be a pain to call up.

I agree, RAID is for storage arrays, corporate level servers.

 

That was what I want to say. RAID is not for non-corp usage.

 

Raid 0 is terrible. You won't get SSD speeds and if one drive fails they both fail, which means essentially double the failure rate.

If you want SSD speed I'd suggest the hybrid. It won't get you the same speeds but it's far more reliable and you'll get a significant boost in some areas.

 

Yes, absolutely. That's why, for original data, I use both RAID1 and backups.

I know, sorry if I came out as implying you did.

I don't know about the specific number you gave, but I agree, in principle.

 

This topic has been exhausted and is now closed.

OP, please do your research before posting.

Thank you.