4 drive RAID 0?

[Silversierra]

As the title says, is it possible to use four identical sata hard drives as a raid 0 array? If so, would it be faster than a 2 drive raid 0?

 

[Baked]

Yes it'll be faster than 2 HD RAID 0, but bad idea, very bad idea. When 1 drive craps, the whole array will go down as well. If you have 4 HDs, do RAID 0+1, assuming you have a controller that supports it. You can also do RAID 5 w/ 3 or more HDs.

 

[xylem]

As with a 2-drive array, it depends what you are doing. In cases where 2-drive arrays are faster than a single drive, you can expect a 4-drive array to be faster still. Is it worth the cost and increase risk of one of your drives failing and bringing down the array? I very seriously doubt it.

 

[sharkeeper]

Best handled by SCSI realm.

 

[DaveSimmons]

You have slightly less than 4 times the failure rate compared to using a single drive. For example if there is a 3% chance one drive will fail within 6 months, you now have an 11.47% chance of losing all of your data within that same 6 months.

So if you decide to do this, be sure you have a good backup strategy.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
You have slightly less than 4 times the failure rate compared to using a single drive. For example if there is a 3% chance one drive will fail within 6 months, you now have an 11.47% chance of losing all of your data within that same 6 months.

So if you decide to do this, be sure you have a good backup strategy.

RAID0 arrays are primarily useful as very fast scratch disks for video editing, databases, etc., because of their very high STR and ability to run multiple I/Os in parallel (although RAID5 tends to be used for anything where the data is not easily replacable, as it is almost as fast and can tolerate a single drive failure). I would not recommend any non-mirrored type of disk for storage of critical data, unless it is backed up frequently.

That said, even using multi-disk RAID1 arrays that can tolerate multiple failures does not remove the need for backups. User error or catastrophic problems with the system can still destroy your data, no matter how fault-tolerant your hard drives are.