RAID 0 and RAID 1

I don't thoroughly understand the difference and performance differences between RAID 1 and RAID 0. What performance advantages does one have over the other, and which one is preferable in intense gaming? If someone can direct me to a sticky that I am clearly missing, that would be great, also. Thanks.

 

RAID 1 - more secure, renders half of your hard drives unusable.

RAID 0 - faster, less secure. If 1 HDD fails, data on both is lost

games = RAID0 better

 

RAID 0 (striped disks) distributes data across several disks in a way that gives improved speed and full capacity, but all data on all disks will be lost if any one disk fails.

RAID 1 (mirrored settings/disks) duplicates data across every disk in the array, providing full redundancy. Two (or more) disks each store exactly the same data, at the same time, and at all times. Data is not lost as long as one disk survives. Total capacity of the array is simply the capacity of one disk. At any given instant, each disk in the array is simply identical to every other disk in the array.

I'm guessing RAID 0 is the way to go for gaming, but I'm not sure the performance gains are that large.

 

How often does one of the HDD fail? In other words, would it be wise to backup everything on an external / 3rd hard drive?

 

It's always a good idea to back up your important data externally, but hard drives in a RAID configuration will not be any more prone to failure than if they weren't in RAID.

 

I have a Linux server that I set up and administer that is hardware RAID 1.

It has two identical hard drives and a special disk controller that keeps the two drives in sync and in the event one drive fails it uses the other one. It also will rebuild the replaced drive automatically if one replaces hardware as the result of a failure. To the Linux operating system, it just appears as one drive.

Both performance and reliability are complex topics.

Performance: Even with a special (cheap) controller, the performance of my RAID 1 array is poorer than a single drive, especially on writes. (Fortunately, it is a low-voume underutilized server.) RAID in any form does not typically or always result in a performance increase. Depends on the controllers, the software, how it is all interfaced, etc.

Reliability: There are still lots of single points of failure, so one does not truly square a low probability. For example, my hard drive controller could fail and take both drives with it. However, the probability of hard drive mechanical failure is judged to be far higher, so RAID 1 makes sense.

When you say "gaming" it isn't clear what you are trying to do. Are you a gamer playing on a PC who doesn't want to lose data? In that case, either RAID 1 or periodic backups or preferably both are probably best.

Or, are you running a gaming server?

Dave.

 

Hello Ikemnitz,

Do you want to learn about the RAID, what is the difference between
and how to set it, look at this site:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/393/1

Hope it is helpful.

 

They aren't unusable when a drive fails.

RAID 1 is a mirror -- where you trade off space for a measure of redundancy.

It has no security at all.

Only if you have some mechanism for backing up your drives. If you don't, you have doubled the odds that a failure will take out your data.

Most people don't backup their data.

 

Games don't necessarily load any faster with RAID 0. RAID 0 loads very large files faster, as they are compartmented in a fashion that favors RAID 0, but games don't have any files that are usually large enough to really take advantage of it. That being said, RAID 0 is great if you've got massive data files, for something like video editing, but RAID 1 is the safe bet if you want to ensure data security. A good idea, to me, is if you have, for example, a laptop with two 320 GB HDDs you should set up RAID 1, and purchase an external drive of equal or larger size (pretty freakin' cheap nowadays anyway). Now you have a backup of your primary computer files, and you've got the external for keeping non-essentials (music, movies, etc) on.

It all depends on how much space you need, but RAID 1 is a safe bet unless you're doing any of what was mentioned above.

 

raid0 can load small files faster, too, depends on stripe size. i've seen a lot of load time reduction in games due to raid 0.

but yes, raid 0 with hard drives in a notebook just cries for problems

an other option would be to go async: a small (say 30gb, 60gb) ultrafast ssd, and a big (500gb currently) hdd for storage. no raid1 in security (but backup is always needed, independent of raid), but high performing and a lot of storage.