Opinion on RAID 0 notebook/desktop

Hi, do you have any opinion regarding RAID 0 in notebook/desktop?
Would you recomending me using RAID 0?

any compatibelity issue? reliability? ease of maintance (how do you perform scandisk, defragment; do the system sees it as one drive or still two? do we need to scan each disk seperately?)

thanks. just curious.

 

someboedy correct me if I am wrong: but RAID 0 speeds up data storage by splitting the data across 2 drives. The hard d is the most unreliable part of a PC, since it is a mechanical device compared to simple elctronic semiconductor chips. By doing RAID 0, you will double your failure rate. If you lose one drive, you lose your data.

I think RAID 1 (disc mirroring) or RAID 5 (RAID 0 + 1 together with 3 drives to both speed up the data access and provide for data recovery in case one drive fails), is a much better way to go.

The data is the most valuable part of most people's PC or network. Impossible to replace 50G or 200G worth of data. For me, it is well worth spending money to protect my data. And RAID chips and disc drives are dirt cheap now to make it affordable to protect my data.

This fall I intend to build a white-box as a file-server and RAID 1 secure storage for my home network (won't need RAID 5 since my speed will be limited to the slow 802.11g speeds). When 802.11n are full up and running up to speed, then upgrade to that. and go to RAID 5.

 

Okay so if its either a RAID 1 or RAID 0

any compatibility issue? reliability? ease of maintance (how do you perform scandisk, defragment; do the system sees it as one drive or still two? do we need to scan each disk seperately?)

 

Assuming you have a good RAID controller: The RAID is invisible at the OS level. Everything will operate as if you have one drive. You can scandisk, defrag, even partition typically. If your RAID controller is not so good, you could have problems. Investigate the individual controller.

mk1992's definition of RAID 0 and RAID 1 is correct - RAID 0 is fast but has no redundancy, RAID 1 has redundancy but loses efficiency. RAID 5 is not the same as RAID 0+1; RAID 5 uses parity data to create redundancy, while RAID 0+1 is simply a combination of striping and mirroring.

 

Ok thanks, hey btw what is this "problem" ur talking about? do u mean, some RAID controller will make us see TWO drives, and the good one make u see ONE drive (which i want) when u do everything (from defrag to scan disk)

Oh one more thing, i already know that there are lots of RAID config and know what it is used for, thanks for explaining anyway. As for the danger of RAID 0, i'm planning to use an external backup drive.

 

I would go with RAID 0 and make sure you have daily backups to an external disk. I have a NAS box and use vice-versa to backup when my notebook is idle.

You will definitely get speed gains from a RAID 0 setup, and if you backup your data, everything will be safe.

 

I have never seen a RAID controller that made it appear as two drives at least as system volumes, as that would not be a RAID setup in the least.