BiGBrOwNPimpsta

Well I need to upgrade my 250gb hard drives to 2 500gb hard drives soon. Few weeks ago, what I did for my friend was setup a Raid 0 on his 2x500gb seagates then partitioned them. The data is striped across 2 hard drives now. My other buddy told me I probably made it worse for him if he had data loss corruption with little benefit.

Can anyone agree with this? I would think if I took 2x500gb 32mb seagates in Raid 0 I would get better performance than my raptor. I am not at all impressed with my raptor as it is SATA 150 and noisy. My friends tell me though it really does work. What to do?

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CDsDontBurn

the answer is yes...to both, lol.

while, RAID 0 does increase performance, and with 32MB cache drives for a total of 64MB cache in RAID 0, those two drives will definately out perform a single RAID 0 raptor array (due to having double the cache). So, you do gain teh performance of having two or more drives in a RAID 0 array.

Then there's the data loss part. If a single one of those drives were to fail, EVERYTHING is lost in terms of data. sure, a hard drive has warranty, but who cares about the warranty of the drive when ALL your important data is lost?

realistically, if you want the best of both worlds, you want to go with a RAID 5 array.

honestly though, what i suggest that you do for yourself, your friend, or whoever you do a RAID 0 array, is to only have programs installed on it. windows, games, proggies, etc. Just remember to have all the data saved onto a seperate drive or other location to avoid the higher risk of data loss.

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BiGBrOwNPimpsta

hmm interesting... i don't think I want 4 hard drives... i need 1TB for storing my data. then 300gb would be good for programs, 150 is making do for now

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Judas

The "IF" is pretty iffy...

As i've ran numerious raid setups, and so far i've yet to have one fail...

Frankly it's no different then running a single hardrive and having it fail, your data's gone.... period...

Obviously with ever drive you add to raid 0, increases the "chances" of it failing as all it takes is ONE drive to crash.

But lets face it, even increasing your chances by a factor of 6, the chances are still slim to none......

the Performance of 2x500gb barracuda 7200.11's way outpace that of the raptors in a identical configuration. He's got the performance, just make sure that he's got backup of his most critical files.

I usually roll with no less then a 8gb usb flash drive and a external Hardrive for making full duplicate copies of everything important.. obvious the 8gb drive for highly critical... and the 750gb external for everything else be it downloads/pictures/music/movies...everything.

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Zelig

Keep in mind that copying/moving across partitions of a RAID 0 array is significantly slower than copying from drive to drive not in an array.

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CDsDontBurn

yes, reading is much faster than writing on a RAID 0 array.

so, you can boot into windows and load up games faster, but if you're writing a lot of data, then it's not going to be much faster than a single drive config.

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Judas

i always thought a 160MB/s transfer from one partition to another partition on the same raid array was fairly good when running 4x drives in raid...

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Ferret_Style

Honestly i run raid 0 with 2 80 SATA 2 drives (i was cheap when i made this system). I have a second 300 gb Sata 2 drive for my documents and other data. It has already saved me once due to operator error.... I was installing a 4 th drive an broke the raid by accident... lost all my data on the Raid 0 but due to having my data on the 3rd drive it all survived.

I highly recommend raid 5 or running a 3rd drive for backup.

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Zelig

It would be significantly faster from one 2x RAID 0 array to a second 2x RAID 0 array.

Think about where the heads physically have to move in both scenarios.

Assuming the drives are defragged:

Drives: A, B, C, D in RAID 0:

Read from A1, B1, C1, D1, write to A10000, B10000, C10000, D10000, read from A2, B2, C2, D2, write to A10001, B10001, C10001, D10001, etc.

Drives A, B and C, D in RAID 0:

Read from A1, B1, write to C1, D1, read from A2, B2, write to C2, D2, etc.

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Judas

i'm aware of that lol..

Obviously having to move from one area of the drive to another area of the drive to read...then write... is going to be slow... it's no different then a single hardrive doing it....


What i find odd is that people think 1 hardrive, 1 hardrive,

But then they think, 2 hardrives, 2 hardrives
which is very much correct....

however, 2 hardrives in raid 0 , 2 hardrives? Answer is essentially no because it should be treated as a single hardrive, just one BIGGER/Faster/twice as likely to fail Hardrive.

Everything that affects a single hardrive... it's pros....cons..... affect the RAID 0 array identically.

But imo, it's not exactly that common to be constantly moving data around like that.

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CDsDontBurn

RAID 0 should be treated as one large(r) drive yes. it should also be treated as a drive that won't be having too much data written to it. however that data that is written to it, will constantly be accessed by the user(s)

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