To RAID or not to RAID - that is the question!

I am looking for some input and opinions, so I guess I have come to the right place

I am about to buy a new Clevo W870CU with Win 7 and have the option to fit two hard drives and I am in a quandry as to whether it is better to
a) fit a 160 GB Intel X-25M SSD as a primary and a 500 GB HDD as a secondary; or
b) 2 x 160 GB Intel X-25M SSD's in RAID; or
c) 2 x 500 GB HDD in RAID; or
d) remain with a single 500 GB HDD.

I am happily living with 230 GB on my Hard Drive now so space is not the issue and neither is the price if the performance is substantially better. For me performance is very important but I am also working in an area where I have little computer support. In the past I have been using Nortons Ghost to do a full back up every weekend, knowing if I have a Harddrive problem I can just go out, buy another Hard Drive and restore from my backup.

I use the computer for both gaming and work. Work, as far as the computer is concerned is nothing too strenuous - mainly Microsoft Office.

So my questions really are:
a) Will there be a performance gain using HDD's in RAID over a single SSD drive + HDD;
b) Will the performance gain using SSD's in RAID be substantial over conventional HDD's in RAID;
c) Will having a RAID setup complicate my backup strategy?

 

I would definitely do dual X-25M's in RAID 0, if you can afford it. Just make sure to regularly back stuff up on an external HDD.v

 

They aren't going to be substaintial gains. But definitely noticeable gains though.

It isn't going to overly complicate your backup strategy. Just be familiar with how to build a RAID partition before you restore the system image.

 

just be aware that raid0 takes time to initialize => bootup most likely is even slower than just one x-25m..

 

How much slower are we talking for boot-up? As slow as a single HDD

PS - Thanks to whoever deleted the multiple posts. slow and intermittent internet connections are a part of the problems of working where I do.

 

SSD for O/S and programs + HDD for storage.

 

well, imagine boot up takes 20 seconds. with a raid0 solution, it might then take, say 18 secs (boot time is not only hdd related, somewhen drivers have to start, hw has to initialize etc). but the raid controller initializing your raid array might take it's own 5 seconds (mine does). so in the end, the whole boot thing takes 23 seconds.

 

"be aware" that more often than not, a blown-up RAID-0 set is completely unrecoverable.

Meaning 100% data loss. Even on the drive that isn't damaged.

 

I cannot agree more. Others have said it as well, but unless you RELIGIOUSLY backup, RAID is not for you.

 

isn't that what normal people do? believe it will not go wrong?

 

How much on your HDD are you really worried about losing? Dont most people store important (and large) files on externals? If this lappy went down right now, I would be worried at all...I can reinstall everything in a matter of hours...

I vote 1SSD, 1HDD. I dunno if RAID 0 is really neccessary with an SSD...

 

On SSDs, RAID is extremely efficient. Because access times are not really relevant on an SSD, you literally are about doubling performance (minus the overhead lost on the RAID controller).
Normally, I am strongly against a RAID-0 in a laptop... but I'm not with SSDs, not at all. Shock is not a risk with an SSD, and SSDs have incredibly low failure rates. When they do have issues, those issues would not likely break your RAID, they will cause corrupt files which would be equally possible on non-RAID SSDs.

So if you can afford it... the RAID-0 is hands down going to be the best performing option.

 

Hep
hope I do this right I have a HPdv6500 model Laptop My DVD/CDdrive saids drive can not be found. I would like to check my drive to see if it is still plucked in.
I have 2 screw plates on the back. Would You know which one (plate) I need to unscrew. I realy don't want to unscrew the wrong one and have something fall out

 

benhogan7, please avoid topic hijacking.
Make a new topic in this subforum: http://forum.notebookreview.com/forumdisplay.php?f=3 and I will attend to your post when I can.

 

Single SSD's routinely outperform software RAID'ed SSD's in real world benchmarks. All of the top real world benchmark records are held by desktops with hardware RAID configurations. AFAIK you cannot configure a notebook with a hardware RAID controller. I called Adaptec and Areca and they said it would be an interesting project...but no one has tried it yet.

 

Thanks Hep and to everone else for their comments. I am strongly leaning to getting the dual SSD's but that brings me to another question regarding the back up process.
I currently use Norton Ghost to do a complete disk copy onto a portable HD and I know that Ghost won't work with Win 7. So what does and what do I need to know before hand? Ghost was flexible in that I could restore to a different drive, in the same computer of course, so if I needed to increase my HDD capacity I could or if my HDD died again no problem.
a) If I have a SSD failure in RAID can I replace it with a similar capacity but different brand drive;
b) Could I, if necessary, restore to a single HDD?

Edit - The data on the backup must be accessible. If I lose my computer I must be able to access the data from the backup to a different computer. I always have the disks to install the essential programs so if I need to buy a computer and can't get the same computer I can still keep working.

 

a) Yes, but I would make sure the controllers on the drives were the same at the very least. And you'd only get the usability of the smallest drive x 2, not both drives combined.

b) Yep, an image does not really care where it's going. At the worst you'd deploy the image to a drive and read data off of there... but even a single drive would boot as long as it was on the same AHCI/RAID chipset. If you were to do disk to disk imaging (nothing is stored on the backup disk EXCEPT the backup) then you can access the data from other systems without additional work. Though I am not sure how that would work incrementally.