Is RAID 0 really useless?

[JoLim24601]

http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/515/1

Read this.

By no means am I advocating one site over the other I would just like to know what people think about it.

 

[fstime]

I dont care about gaining performance from raid, I use it to double my storage.

An example would be: I have two 40 gig hard drives, I raid them and now I have an 80 gig.

 

[bigshooter]

Or you could just have two 40 gig drives and still have 80 gigs.

 

[fstime]

Nah, you see I have 3 hard drives, 2x 40 gig and 1x 160 gb. Raid 0 has been excellent so far. No problems what so ever.

 

[sniperruff]

the idea of losing data in both hard drives all at once is scary

 

[cyto]

I don't like onboard RAID controllers simply because you can't switch to another board when you upgrade. You have to reformat and set the RAID on that controller. If you have any inclination of keeping your drives when you upgrade, use an add-on RAID controller card. It makes for much easier times when switching MB's.
Now, as for RAID itself, I think for business applications it speeds up access but as for games, I've seen the tests run where the FPS actually drop a few frames. Not what you really want for performance. I've simply gone with a 74GB Raptor and get super access times, both read and write. I will get a Maxtor 10 with SATA II, NCQ and 16MB of cache when the SLI BIOS stop losing this drive on POST.

 

[Tarrant64]

The risk of losing your data on both drives IMHO is the same as it would be if you just had one. I don't believe RAID means that your at a higher risk of losing your data. Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[qbek]

If one of your RAID0 HDs fails you will loose data from BOTH drives.
Thus, the risk of data loss is double that of the single drive (since any of the two RAID drives could fail).

 

[SVT Cobra]

Just go with a raid 0+1 and your set for performance and data backup...and in some cases RAID 0+1 is faster than a stripped RAID array...i believe i read it here in an old article......

 

[HalfCrazy]

In my main computer I got a 120gig ATA133 hdd. Plus two 120gig SATA hdds in raid 0. I really like the computer alot.

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: Tarrant64
The risk of losing your data on both drives IMHO is the same as it would be if you just had one. I don't believe RAID means that your at a higher risk of losing your data. Correct me if I'm wrong.

You're wrong. If each drive has, say, a 5 percent chance of failing, then a RAID-0 array has a 10 percent chance of failing.

 

[debts]

RAID 0 just seems silly....unless you have a ton of HD's lying around of various sizes that you don't plan on using anywhere else ever. It's only a convenience benefit, not a performance benefit.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Son of a N00b
Just go with a raid 0+1 and your set for performance and data backup...and in some cases RAID 0+1 is faster than a stripped RAID array...i believe i read it here in an old article......

You might have read it, but you didn't see any benchmarks showing that. :laugh:

RAID 0 isn't silly if you have a need for it. To beat a dead horse... RAID 0 doesn't do much at all for regular everyday desktop applications.

 

[amdskip]

I run 2 seagate 160's in raid 0. I have my important information backed up so that if one were to die I wouldn't be screwed. I set this array up and I'm too lazy to just set it up as a single drive. I don't know if it adds much speed but the system has been super stable.

 

[JonathanYoung]

I bought 2 80GB drives for a RAID-0 to speed up DVD authoring but the "improvement" is imperceptible. The only difference I've noticed is that Windows starts up a little faster after you move the swap file to the RAID array. But, the tradeoff is the addition of the RAID BIOS detecting my drives after POST, which negates the faster Windows load. So, RAID-0 has basically done nothing for me.