Advantages of a two drive raid set up v one sata drive.

[mrudd]

Beside the obvious extra space. What are the performance etc., advantages of a two sata drive raid over a single sata drive setup?

 

[FastEddie]

raid0 (stripping) over a single drive = speed!

 

[Robor]

Originally posted by: mrudd
Beside the obvious extra space. What are the performance etc., advantages of a two sata drive raid over a single sata drive setup?

IMO and experience it's not worth it. Number one you have the cost of 2 drives instead of one and number two if either of those drives should fail you lose everything. I had a pair of Raptors striped in my old setup and one day I got a BSOD. Booted up to find one of the drives had fallen out of the array. I added it back in without any problem but guess what? It wouldn't boot. Repair didn't work either.

Also, many will say the speed difference isn't that great. Windows my boot a little faster and games my load a few seconds quicker but is it worth the extra $$$ and data risk? I believe there was an Anandtech article that had benchmarks showing unless you're doing specific tasks you're not going to see a huge benefit.

 

[carpenter]

I haven't posted on the motherboard forum for quite some time. But when I saw this thread, I had to say something. First, I agree with Robor word for word. I think a lot of times, the raid 0 setup myth and the promise of amazing speed gets everyone to try this. I've run 2 comps for 2 years now, one with raid 0 and one without. The load speeds are a little faster with raid, but hardly noticeable. And I always fear losing a drive and losing all my data. I finally talked a cousin into setting up a 64 system with a small raptor master drive and a large storage drive as slave and he loves it. Gets the fast load times without the raid hassles. Also has a lot more storage at no extra cost. And it runs games like a banshee. Raid 0 isn't a bad thing, just not enough of an advantage to justify the added risks and costs.

 

[sxr7171]

Originally posted by: carpenter
I haven't posted on the motherboard forum for quite some time. But when I saw this thread, I had to say something. First, I agree with Robor word for word. I think a lot of times, the raid 0 setup myth and the promise of amazing speed gets everyone to try this. I've run 2 comps for 2 years now, one with raid 0 and one without. The load speeds are a little faster with raid, but hardly noticeable. And I always fear losing a drive and losing all my data. I finally talked a cousin into setting up a 64 system with a small raptor master drive and a large storage drive as slave and he loves it. Gets the fast load times without the raid hassles. Also has a lot more storage at no extra cost. And it runs games like a banshee. Raid 0 isn't a bad thing, just not enough of an advantage to justify the added risks and costs.

That's exactly how I want to do it, get Raptor boot drive and maybe 2 300GB drives in RAID 1 (or 3x300GB in Raid 5).