RAid 0, heard so much, but not enough

Can anybody post a link that will help a beginner to set up a raid 0 on his HDDs ?

 

do you know for sure that your laptop has a raid controller? Or are you trying to do software RAID?

 

Why do you even want RAID0? What is your notebook, motherboard chipset and HDD/SSD configuration?

 

Raid0 = RaidNothing. Be sure that no protection and chance of 100% data loss is what you want......

 

also half of ur hard drive space is lost.. u should get an SSD instead.. much better speed upgrade... u can still have 1 hard drive for data storage.

 

not quite sean, better re-check your raid levels and the overhead.

 

Yes, the chance of data loss is greater; approximately twice as high, since the failure of any one of your hard drives mean you loose all your data. Of course, that's what backups are for, and I have never had a laptop hard drive fail on me in the last ten years. It is also true that the performance increase you will see with laptop drives and chipsets, while real, is not as much as you might expect. Nevertheless, RAID does have its place, even in laptops. As long as you know what you are doing, and why.

Huh? Where did you get that idea? Unless you talk about RAID1, which is mirroring, in which case your space isn't "lost" either, it's just used for data protection. There is no loss of drive space for RAID0.

 

There's nothing wrong with RAID 0. I run RAID 0 for 2 years now on my M1730 and not a single failure has occurred. It's a pity to know there are so many other RAID 1 notebooks I know of that failed even earlier than mine. It's not a matter of a "higher chance of failure", though a calculation of MTTF is insisted, but rather the chance of loosing all data in an event of a failure in RAID 0 is more prevailant. But still, the overall effectiveness of the drive or the "chance of failure" is the reliability of a harddrive and how you, as a user take good care of your harddisks. I can set mine to RAID 1, but if I snap a drive by dropping it will still fail. But due to data mirroring nature of RAID 1, it isn't as bad as RAID 0.

And a little common sense comes a long way - backup regularly. Regardless of what RAID type you're in from 1 - 5. Granted, I've a RAID 0 setup, but I backup every end of the week on a another harddrive.

Do also note that not all but certain dual-drive notebooks allow RAID in the BIOS. My Inspiron 1720 doesn't have RAID, but the M1730 has.

@Sean, no, you will not loose any space at all. A simple example; two 500GB HDDs on RAID 0 will be read as a single C drive with 1TB capacity.

 

RAID 0 can be a significant increase in performance, but most of it depends on the RAID controller itself. Laptops, as far as I know use software-assisted RAID and not a dedicated processor that handles only the RAID functions like you would find on a hardware RAID controller. If the controller has the ability to enable write-caching, then performance should increase significantly even with software RAID, but you run the risk of data failure if power is lost, which I guess is not a huge issue with laptops. This is why real RAID controllers have battery backup units.

 

ok i didn't know that. I really need a new laptop for more experience..

 

RAID 0 ONLY give a performance boost if the controller is up to the task.

OS-based RAID 0 probably isn't and won't.

Ananad and Toms did test/reviews of RAID 0 on stock (motherboard) controllers a while back. They were unimpressed.