I'm building a new computer over the summer. I'm fairly competent in computer hardware, and am thus building the computer from scratch. I have everything planned out, but I was wondering about RAID. I asked which RAID I should use earlier, but now that it's pretty clear that RAID 1 isn't really that great, I think I'll go with cloud-backup instead of disk-redundancy. However, I still face a choice: use two 1 TB drives as two 1 TB drives, or combine them into a RAID 0 striped array. Is there any performance gain at all? I know that if one drive dies, everything is gone, so is the performance gain worth it? I'm building a pretty advanced computer, with SLI video cards and a fast CPU, so I'm thinking RAID 0 would give me some good hard drive performance. From your experience, is RAID 0 viable?
9 Answers
Hardware-RAID-0 is always faster than a single drive because you can step the reads and writes across the two drives simultaneously. Downside is that if either drive fails, you lose data on both disks. So if your backups are good, and you are willing to take the risk of a slightly higher risk of data loss, go for it.
Software-RAID-0 can provide improvements, but in my opinion not enough to justify the increased risk of data loss. Also, you almost can almost never boot from a software-RAID-0 partition.
Wasn't there an article recently that had an obscene number of TB drives in a stripe to see how the performance compared?
- 4,002
Don't do this. Instead of buying one of those TB hard drives, buy a western digital raptor or velociraptor drive. It's small, yes, but you don't need to put THAT much content on your main system drive.
What you get are latency and transfer speeds that far exceed what two large TB drives will ever be capable of. Even though the throughput from raid is pretty high, you still have to have one of your two drives find the start of a file before it can begin playback, meaning that for many smaller files, or when you're accessing lots of different files, as during startup, your raid array is not speeding things up substantially. Furthermore, it might even be degrading performance, depending on your read/write problem.
Go with a fast 10k rpm drive as your system drive for the things that need to be fast, and use a big drive for media storage. They're different tasks, use the appropriate hardware for each.
- 846
Raid 0 with two drives is not going to show much improvement in the way of performance. Sure there will be some, your are splitting your writes between two spindles, but not enough for it to really make a difference.
Where raid 0 really shines is when you are string many drives together, say 15. Now when you split your writes across that many drives you will surely see an improvement in your disk io and latency.
If your machine supports a hardware raid and you are looking for some performance/redundancy improvement, why not go to three drives (or four) and setup a raid 5 array. Sure there is a slight performance hit during writes, but I am willing to bet your computer usage will be mostly reads anyhow.
I just finished building a new workstation (gaming + development) for myself just two weeks ago, I decided to go with an 80GB SSD on the boot drive and three 500GB HDD's, in RAID 5 configuration, for data. I swear to you, once you go SSD, you will never go back.
- 627
You need to carefully consider the overall system rather than just focusing on one piece at a time.
Unless you are already going all out on your other components, you'll probably get a much better performance gain by putting your money in places other than RAID 0. Memory (Size, not so much speed), CPU & GPU will all likely be much better bang for your buck.
- 1,320
I have experienced raid0 for 2 years (2x1 TB), and i have now switched to SSD (OCZ vertex2 120 GB for system + 2x1 TB non-raid). When you run benchmarks (HD tune or CrystalDiskMark) you see that raid0 really improves performance on big file transfer (which pratically never occurs), and not much on many little files transfer. So raid0 is good for one thing : transfering hd movies and nothing else. SSD has good transfer rate AND access time, so it's good for everything (booting, launching programs, transferring big and little files...).
From a user point of wiew, raid0 compared to standard HDD usage is not really perceptible, whereas SSD really is. I also play sometimes, and i can say that games load way faster with SSD than with raid0. So when you have experienced SSD, there is no going back.
Whith that said, there is another alternative which are hybrid HDD, like this seagate momentus. I have never tested those, but judging by reviews, it seems quite promising.
- 6,160
Really depends on why you think you need the extra performance. Some current hard drives have some very impressive read speeds on their own. This would give you a second 1TB drive to play with.
Having had RAID-0 in my machine I didn't notice any great differences.
You could benchmark a single drive with HDTach and then do the same once you have the RAID array setup.
Raid 0 is excellent for non-mission critical situations. I have 2 systems that I use at home, one is for gaming, the other I do all of my browsing/email/mundane tasks. On my gaming system I use a raid 0. I gain the performance benefits such as faster texture loads, and if I have a failure, reinstalling games is no big deal. I would NEVER put raid 0 on something that I couldn't afford to lose.
- 2,183
I have two 500GB Seagate v11 drives that I tried using in RAID 0 and it gave my bootup process fits... I am using one of those drives right now and since it has 32MB cache (over the 8MB I had been using..) I don't see the need in going with RAID 0. Also since I am using Windows 7, I am going to use the other 500 GB drive for the built in Windows backup feature, which I think is preferable to RAID 1 even.
My advice would be if you need speed, go with a smaller SSD (32 or 64GB) for your boot drive and use a traditional hard drive for your non-OS programs and files...
Good luck : )
