Should I RAID 0 or should I not?

Well I'm planning to do a system wipe a little later tonight, was going to wipe both of my hard drives clean and reinstall windows/etc. Now, originally, I had my hard drives from the laptop in my sig in RAID-0. One failed, and I RMA'd it and ran off the single HDD. When I got the other back, I used that basically as my games drive.

It's not bad having a games-only drive, I run the OS/music/videos/etc off the OS drive, and steam/retail games off the second one. But now I'm contemplating going back to RAID-0. Do you guys think it'll make a big difference in games' loading times/etc? I didn't notice it at first before my hard drive went bad, but I didn't have much time to explore them back then. I was wondering if a separate drive for games and one for everything else (including playclaw/fraps recordings) would still be better? It's what I've been using since then, for about a 20 months now. But of course, RAID-0 intrigues me. I know it's supposed to be faster. But I just wanted some opinions before I do it; if I have to change my mind afterward I'll have to wipe both drives clean again, so I figured now is the best time to decide, when I'm already planning on doing this.

 

Personally, i think RAID0 is a heap of problems waiting to happen. Yes, it is faster, but if one of your drives fail it's gonna be complicated getting everything back in working order. If you have the money for it, you're much better off going for a SSD boot drive + HDD combo, fast and more reliable. You can either get an enclosure for the other 500GB drive if you go for a SSD or put it in your PS3 if you have one (well, that's what i would do).

 

When I RAID-0'd before, I didn't get any issues other than that drive being a dud (failed about a month after I got it). Since then both drives (the replacement and the original 2nd drive) have been chuggin along all fine. It's just that as I'm planning to wipe both drives tonight anyway, I figured I'd ask. Might as well put it into RAID if I'm ever going to, you know?

And if I could afford a good SSD (for the amount of flickin data I use), I'd probably just sell this, take the SSD money, get a P170HM with some momentus XTs and call that george. Or Vanessa. I don't like the name George.

 

If you never move your laptop and keep it always at home, I'd recommend going external. You can pick up a 500gb external that is relatively small and compact. If you have a large amount of data then you could go the route that I choose and picked up a Samsung f4 for $80 and a external enclosure for $20. That leaves you with the ability to use a 750gb drive and a 64gb ssd. Either way depending on how much money you have to spend determines what level of performance.

1000gb - Raid 0 Momentus XT - $200
814gb - c300/Scorpio Blue - $215

Either way I'd go with the SSD/HDD and load up your programs on your SSD. You can save everything unto the HDD.

 

But, I'm not asking for upgrades, and even so, I don't live in the US. I'd have to import everything, and it'll be expensive as hell. It's what I've got now, I was just wondering the best option to do with it.

 

I would stay away from RAID-0, RAID-1 if you need that level of security, but the gains from RAID-0 isn't enough in my opinion to accept the risks.

 

id agree with a small 60GB ssd for os, and everything else on the other hdd. that way if something goes wrong, you can reinstall os without losing music, pics, videos. just have to reinstall games and programs. but if you dont want to spend the money, do the same thing. os on one and everything else on the other. no raid.

 

Go for it, why not. Just make sure to backup what's important externally.

Alternatively, you can go for a more flexible software-based configuration, like this.

 

If you're only worried about gaming, RAID 0 wont help performance at all. However, I still run a RAID 0 configuration because it makes a big difference in large transfer operations like backing up your OS and data. I've been running RAID 0 for years and now my laptop is starting to fall apart; I only ever recieved 1 failure report from my RAID software which to my surprise I was easily able to recover from without effect. My drives run hotter than those in most laptops as they are completely isolated from any air movement due to the laptop design.

 

Or, you could actually try the 'search' button. This topic's been discussed at least two or three times in the last month. Conclusion each time: don't mess with Raid

 

Without even reading the post and just based on the title I can usually say something like "You should not go Raid 0" because chances are if you had a use for Raid 0 you would already know and would not even have to ask the question.

People that have a use for Raid 0 are usually professionals with a very special circumstance that will take advantage of Raid 0 and they know that already and thus use it without needing to ask.

The average day to day user and even pro-user has little to no use for Raid 0 really.

 

+1 to above message. Was just going to type the same thing until I read your post lol.

 

Not to beat a dead horse;

99% of non-enterprise people do NOT need RAID. There is a common misconception of RAID and it's benefits, and sales people pitch it all the time when selling motherboards.

RAID 0 is pretty much only useful if you do LOTS of I/O (reading/writing data). As it's been stated, it has 0% gaming performance increase. And because of the data striping, if you experience a drive failure, you have to restart and getting data is a pain if not impossible (not an issue if you have your data on another drive).

RAID 1 is only useful for OS redundancy, it is NOT a form of backup in backup's sense. RAID 1 mirrors the main drive onto the 2nd drive. RAID 1 protects you against drive failure if replaced immediately. The nice part is your data and programs and OS are still in-tact. However if you experience OS corruption or a virus attack, then it gets mirrors onto the second drive. In essence RAID 1 is a backup but in a way is not a backup.

The question is, what do you primarily do with your laptop? Likely with a Sager or Alienware, it is gaming so RAID 0 will result in no performance gain. If you were doing something like music production or video rendering, realize also many programs have problems with RAID controllers. If you really want a "fast" drive then consider getting an SSD as your main OS boot drive and a large secondary storage drive such as the 750 GB Scorpio Black.

 

Um, performance icnrease? As in snappier app loading and faster boot?
Those seem like pretty good reasons for RAID0. Of course you have to bear in mind the increased risk of failure.

 

If you're willing to double your chance of data loss to shave zero seconds off your boot, go for it. Raid0 must initialize before boot even begins, destroying any and all boot time savings, and in some cases, causing greater losses.

The majority of applications won't load perceptibly faster - the bottleneck is usually HDD seek times, not in the transfer rate. Data loaded by the applications may be a different story, but the improvements if you're looking at any file under 1GB or so is going to be roughly the time it takes you to blink three times.

 

Huh, haven't thought about that.
Well, I have a software RAID-0 partition for Program Files, ProgramData and Users folders, and program loading is noticeably faster from that. It must positively affect boot time at least a bit, since a lot of the startup apps are installed there.
(The partition is regularly backed up along with the OS partition and is expendable anyways, so no worries about redundancy.)

 

If you are at all serious about RAID then you can absolutely forget about software RAID. You buy a 700-2000 dollar RAID card. Too many times I see people use 10 dollar RAID cards and wonder why they are garbage...JMicron RAID FTL!

 

Huh? What gave you that idea? That's a fairytale.

That's nonsense, too, apart from the fact that RAID0 will also reduce seek times.

Rightly so, since RAID initialization is a complete non-issue; it takes essentially no time at all, period.

Otherwise, if you want advice from somebody who is using RAID0 for years now on his production machine, rather than from people spouting hear-say, here is my take:

- Yes, RAID0 will give you a machine that appears faster and more responsive. Not quite like an SSD, but not a bad performance boost at all.

- Yes, your risk of disk failure has doubled. Solution: Make sure you take regular disk images, so that you can restore your system quickly if disaster strikes. Also, typical chipsets these days support matrix-RAID, which means with only two hard drives you can create two RAID volumes, one RAID0 for the OS and programs, and one RAID1 for your original data. This way you can have the best of both worlds. In case of a drive failure you would just restore your system drive with OS and programs from a backup image, and your data will remain intact.

- No, I have hundreds of programs on my machine, and I have never, ever, encountered a single one that had any issues with my RAID configuration. I would go so far as to say that that should be pretty much impossible, since the details of your storage system are transparent to your software.

 

That's what I'm doing. Raid0 for programs, Raid1 for important data and backups of said Raid0, using two HDDs in total.

 

The impact of raiding on boot depends heavily on the quality of the onboard controller and firmware written for it, if it's hardware driven. In some cases, the impact on boot can be near zero, but it depends on the sequence and efficiency of detection, spinup and synchronization of the drives. I'm not familiar enough with Sager or the model in question to know how good or bad the chipset is at RAID, but performance varies across the board. The controllers I've used in the past have been across the board on boot times, but that has no bearing on post-boot performance. Firmware updates to the controllers have a ridiculous impact on boot speed, so support matters.

As far as seek times, iirc stripe size and data type are most the important factors. My assumption is that the bulk of usage is day to day, so stripe will be larger than the typical file size. Perhaps "perceptible" and "destroy" were going overboard, but it's not going to make you reconsider jumping to an SSD. I call day to day SSD load times "snappy"; raid 0 load times don't earn that moniker. For large files (visual media, including textures and maps), it's certainly noticeable.

w.r.t. Matrix raid, imo, throw the OS into 1 with data you can't afford to lose. You lose capacity, but gain safety.