Question RAID 0 - is it worth it?

[D0M1N13]

Hello All!

First let me get out of the way my rig specification:

Processor: i7-3930K
RAM: 16GB DDR3
Motherboard: Asus P9x79 Deluxe
Storage: 1 Samsung 850 PRO (512GB) 1 Samsung 860 PRO (512GB)
Graphic Card: Radeon HD 7970 GHZ Edition

Now that is out of the way, I am thinking about doing a RAID 0 setup but I don't know if it is worth it. I have looked on youtube and on the internet and from what I concluded is that the Sequential reads are double but the 4K reads are not that much of an improvement. Maybe 5% of an improvement as I saw. What I will be doing on this computer of mine is photo editing and using Photoshop and Lightroom and maybe other photo editors. I will not be doing video rendering or editing. Just use my rig for photo editing activities mainly. In my case, is it worth it? Would I see any benefit from it? Would love to read your opinions and also your help.

 

[aigomorla]

Is it worth it?
Depends... on a lot of factors.

Its worth it if you have a lot of little drives, and you want to mass the capacity into 1 drive letter.
Its not worth it, because you need to treat that drive as disposible, meaning if by some off chance 1 of those drives die, your entire contents in said drive letter is gone.
Will i see the speed.... possibly, but a good nVME will still smoke it and say hasta la vista, especially if you get into Gen4.
(seeing how your on a X79, you don't have the option of a nVME, still i would not recommend it, even if you are running PRO's)

Would you benifit from it? possibly not unless you need to cache files need to be larger then 512GB, which then JBOD even doesn't work.

Do i recommend it?
Never... not unless u have like 8 x 120GB drives on a dedicated 12G raid controller, and you want some fun and giggles, but you better have a NAS that makes backups of everything important every other day.

 

[D0M1N13]

Is it worth it?
Depends... on a lot of factors.

Its worth it if you have a lot of little drives, and you want to mass the capacity into 1 drive letter.
Its not worth it, because you need to treat that drive as disposible, meaning if by some off chance 1 of those drives die, your entire contents in said drive letter is gone.
Will i see the speed.... possibly, but a good nVME will still smoke it and say hasta la vista, especially if you get into Gen4.
(seeing how your on a X79, you don't have the option of a nVME, still i would not recommend it, even if you are running PRO's)

Would you benifit from it? possibly not unless you need to cache files need to be larger then 512GB, which then JBOD even doesn't work.

Do i recommend it?
Never... not unless u have like 8 x 120GB drives on a dedicated 12G raid controller, and you want some fun and giggles, but you better have a NAS that makes backups of everything important every other day.

Thanks for your reply.
I understand that if one drive fails then my entire content that I have will be gone forever and ever. I don't care about that because I do regular backups. Plus, how likely is the fail rate of an SSD? HDD's have a much failure rate. So I am not worried about this point.
The speed is the question here. I would most definite gain in sequential speeds but for 4K Random's I won't gain anything at all, maybe just a little bit but the difference wouldn't be that noticeable as I saw from YouTube and Google searches.
So I guess I won't do it. 🙂

My computer is almost 10 years old but still going strong. Probably will serve me another 10 years 😉 But I think what would help a little bit is replacing my 16GB RAM and buying 32GB instead.
Thanks for your response. 🙂

 

[aigomorla]

The x79 i believe is DDR3... I would not invest anymore in that old tech.
If your board is still in great condition, it could sell for a bit on ebay.
I would most probably try to sell it and reinvest it in another system.

IMO, your much better off grabbing a ryzen 7 and going on nvme + ddr4.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

If you want to do it just “to do it” and understand the risk of losing data, I’d go for it but otherwise I agree, speed boost will be nominal and spending money on what you have doesn’t make much sense either.
You are in that weird period where the machine is still pretty useful but improving it is nearly impossible.

 

[UsandThem]

If you want to do it just “to do it” and understand the risk of losing data, I’d go for it but otherwise I agree, speed boost will be nominal and spending money on what you have doesn’t make much sense either.
You are in that weird period where the machine is still pretty useful but improving it is nearly impossible.

Yup+.

Unless you run out memory and need to increase it, it doesn't make sense to drop another $200+ in an old system "just because".

Instead put that money in a jar for your next complete system overhaul.