To RAID or not to RAID, that is the question

**dj-lil-ste** · 12-27-06, 02:33 AM

ok tequila i will add u later

chears m8

i added you and this is not spam its a bump

**Consultant** · 06-11-07, 03:26 PM

My new parts will be arriving later this week (I'm getting pretty antsy and excited) and I'll be recycling my 2 Western Digital SATA HDDs from my current system.

After a fresh format and windows install, that is.

My question is this - Should I do a RAID this time around? It was kinda a PITA (pain in the ass) to setup last time but my new motherboard supports RAID 0/1 and Im wondering.... should I do it?

Advice?

**K0nTANK3Rous** · 06-11-07, 03:35 PM

RAID 0 will offer you faster read, which is good if you don't have one of those 10000 RPM Raptors...

Although thats all it offers. I used to run RAID 1+0, PITA to setup and plus you have to have at least 4 drives but speed is good and you can loose 2 drives without data integrity loss.

If your concern is increased read time not fault tolerance, you can't go wrong with RAID 0.

RAID 1 doesn't offer much more than just redundancy between 2 disks.

**wildsrv** · 06-11-07, 07:59 PM

I had RAID 0 and it was great. Just don't put any thing you CAN'T do with out. If the drive does give out then you haven't lost any thing. If you do it put the OS on the array.

**KromMonkey** · 06-11-07, 08:07 PM

I have been using 2 WD Raptors in a RAID 0 configuration for 3 years now and have not had a problem yet.

...and to Wildsrv's point, I agree. I use mine for OS and applications only. Everything else, uhum...p0rn, goes on other drives.

**Consultant** · 06-12-07, 08:05 AM

Thanks for the advice, I'll be backing up important stuff on an external drive I picked up so it looks like the RAID 0 will be the way to go. I mean, why bottleneck at HDD read/write speed? Right?!

**...bigdog...** · 06-12-07, 10:17 AM

I did RAID 0 as well. No problems, no complaints.

until, of course, I had to reinstall my operating system after a major mobo/cpu/g-card/ram upgrade. RAID-0 just doesn't play nice with windows XP. Also, there's no place to hide the files you want to keep. You can't just make a "partition" and save stuff you don't want to have to reinstall.....music, movies, pictures, etc.

my new setup is simply both of my previoulsy RAID-0 drives plugged in as C: and D:. No RAID.

If I had a 3rd drive, I would likely RAID-0 my OS and programs, and then always have that 3rd drive for my permament shit.

**Mcstrange** · 06-12-07, 11:36 AM

All your raiding questions answered at bit-tech:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...tanding_raid/1

Do I need RAID?
While there are a few situations which may require the use of RAID at home, they are few and far between. There are of course many situations where it isn’t necessary, but it can provide various benefits. As disk capacity grows, more and more important data gets thrown onto our hard drives and a disk failure can cause a serious headache. Protection against data loss in the event of a disk failure can be invaluable, and RAID can provide a great deal of peace of mind.

From a performance point of view however, RAID doesn’t make much of an argument for desktop use. Sure, you may save a second when loading a game, but the same time could be saved by upgrading your CPU or memory. Fact of the matter is, unless you’re doing some pretty hardcore graphics, audio or video work, the performance potential of RAID doesn’t mean much.

The biggest difference you’re likely to notice is when running disk benchmarks that have little or no bearing on real world performance. It’s all one big balancing act between the level of performance needed, the level of redundancy required and the cost of implementation as to whether RAID is worth using, and which level of RAID is the best choice.