Should I select RAID for a new W520?

I am building my new W520 and cannot decide whether I should select a RAID option. In the past, though most of my laptops had two HDD, I could never justify using RAID. My considerations:

1) RAID 0 hardly improves performance for random reads/writes yet shows significant speed increase only for large files. A seek time is the same as for a single drive. If one of the drives fails, all data will be lost.

2) RAID 1 keeps two HDD identical and not a panacea from a virus or corrupted OS. I experienced more cases with corrupted systems rather than physical HDD failures. So, keeping two separate HDDs seems to be a better solution for data reliability, if I make regular backups. Usually, I run weekly backups of all disk images to external drives.

3) SDD performance is much better than RAID 0 anyway. It makes sense to upgrade to SSD rather than messing with RAID 0.

4) If I configure RAID, I cannot swap the drive caddy with DVD via Ualtrabay. For no RAID I can get a great flexibility by swapping different HDD (perhaps I should even purchase a few drive caddies on ebay for $10-15).

so my question is - did someone find RAID really useful for W520? Perhaps I am missing something, but I don't see any reasons why I should get the RAID option for a new W520.

I would appreciate your comments..... should finalize the build configuration shortly.

Thanks

 

If you think you'll ever want raid, configure it. Otherwise don't worry about it. Most people don't need it.

 

It looks as I even cannot select RAID with SSD. I am wondering why Lenovo could not include two SSDs with RAID as an option.

 

I think that says it all.

 

Unless of course you want SSD in yor RAID. Lenovo only sell HDD devices when selecting RAID.

 

RAID SSDs won't get you better latency and for most uses it's the latency that matters more.

 

I've found that for day to day use, I personally notice a significant improvement going from a single disk to a raid 0 configuration. (In all my other systems, I've not tried a single disk configuration in my w520) But not much of an improvement when I upgraded from that to the mSATA SDD. But if you ever want raid 0 with two SDD's, you need to order it with the raid already installed.

The one great thing about going to the mSATA for my primary drive and still keeping my raid array is that my battery life almost doubled.

Finding the data fast is only important if that data is small, when it comes to loading programs I find RAID 0 systems to be much quicker.

 

Very true, but typical notebook usage does not put a heavy load on the controller, though there are uses that certainly do.

 

I enjoy high transfer throughput as well as low latency. I suggest ordering the RAID option, and having full flexibility of installing one or two SSDs. Nice incremental upgrade paths. I'm looking forward to the price of 512GB SSDs going down, it will be fun to watch.