Raid 1 performance

[vorgusa]

I have been looking around trying to figure out if Raid 1 has any performance benefits. I have read things saying both or maybe I miss read them.. I was thinking about getting a TS-201 NAS and was trying to figure out what RAID to do

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

How many hard drives will be in your configuration? And are you doing this primarily for performance, or redundancy, or both?

 

[vorgusa]

just two.. the NAS can only hold two. I would like performance and redundancy... which is why I was thinking about raid 1 when I read that it improves speed.

 

[Baked]

RAID 1 is for redundancy, you get no performance improvement. RAID 0 gives you some performance improvement.

 

[vorgusa]

ok that is what I thought.. damn sites getting my hopes up.. I will probably go for Raid 0 just for the heck of it, since I am not storing sensitive info there

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: Baked
RAID 1 is for redundancy, you get no performance improvement. RAID 0 gives you some performance improvement.

Mostly correct, but as with many things in the wide world of RAID, not always. Good implementations of RAID 1 will take advantage of the availability of data on two drives to read off them faster than possible with a single drive setup sometimes.

nVIDIA RAID, last I tested, did not improve performance.
Intel RAID, according to some of their marketing material, does, at least somewhat.

But of course neither does nothing for write performance.

RAID 0 can improve both read and write performance at the expense of added data risk and lack of any redundancy.