Raid 0 m500?

I am curious on how a Raid 0 would work on having two of the 1 TB m500 drives? How would long load times and boot times be effected? I also do a lot of hibernating and loading large files so i am curious about it. Please don't troll i know raid 0 has issues and errors and exponentially more likely to bugger up.


Also i am curious on how would cloning work? I would like to clone my samsung 840 to the raid 0 and also would like to clone the raid 0 to a 2/3TB hardrive for backup. rather be on a single drive instead of two but i am unsure how that all works.

 

Well the theory is RAID0 will compromise a degree of single queue Random 4k read performance in favour of greater sequential and high queue depth performance. I'm sure you already know the differences between loading small files vs large ones. The Windows 7 (and all previous versions) boot up process requires chain loading heaps of 4k files so your performance determinant is somewhere in between Pure 4k random and true sequential (leaning more towards 4k). Therefore, I think you may see no change or a slight reduction in boot speed. Loading windows from a Hibernation file is more of a sequential affair so I am confident you will notice an improvement with RAID0.
As an interesting side note, The Windows 8 fast boot process involves reading part of the OS from a compressed hibernation file so you will see an improvement with RAID0 (in addition to having a Quadcore and high bandwidth RAM) however it is a diminishing returns event (even more so than a pure restore from Hibernation) since the non-kernel parts are still chainloads of small files.
If you are loading large files (like large models etc) to the RAM, then RAID0 will definitely benefit you as it is designed to boost sequential bandwidth.

The ease of cloning will depend on your software and how you implement the RAID0. If you use the regular Windows RAID0 (aka Dynamic volume with striping) then I cannot advise you since I don't think there are reliable ways yet to do so. From my knowledge you will need to have a bootable Windows USB with RAID drivers. I have only ever managed to successfully backup a RAID 0 using EASUS TODO file backup to a large HDD but never clone.
However, if you use the Intel RST firmware method then Windows will treat it like a regular volume (i.e. all the striping is done transparently in firmware) so it theoretically can clone from the 840 and be backed up seamlessly.

As an interesting trivia, IRST RAID0 volumes cannot be removed from the machine from which it is made unless the new machine has the exact same IRST Firmware, chipset generation and settings. Even then its a crapshoot. The Windows dynamic volume RAID0 can be moved to another machines provided it is running windows 7 or later.