RAID0 with some old HDDs?

[Homerboy]

I have a couple of older Seagate ST3250824AS 250GB HDDs laying around.
I'll be doing a fresh install of Win7 fairly soon, and was thinking of maybe setting these up in RAID0 using the MB's onboard controller.

I assume I would see a fairly notable performance increase over using one of them alone for my C drive? Though if I partitioned them to C and D (C would be OS and D would be pure storage (not installations, but storage for disk images and such) would I see any performance degradation?

Thanks.

 

[bamacre]

"Storage" and RAID 0 are not a good mix. 😀

 

[Homerboy]

"Storage" and RAID 0 are not a good mix. 😀

not perm storage. Temp storage and nothing more. I have a 4TB WHS machine for perm storage.
I guess I'm more interested in the performance gains.of the RAID0 and, if I were to partition it up to C and D if there would be any perf hits.

 

[corkyg]

Performance and storage don't make a lot of sense. RAID0 is always places your data at risk. The older the drive, the riskier, as the liklihood of a drive failure increases. The best RAID for storage is 1.

If your are merely playing with the array for experience and knowledge, then the RAID0 would be OK. Your call.

 

[n7]

Performance boost isn't going to be very noticeable, if at all, but then again, in your case it sounds like a "why not" situation...so, why not.

 

[Emulex]

raid-0 can increase latency - go ssd

 

[nipplefish]

raid-0 can increase latency - go ssd

This...
RAID0 increases straight-line transfer speed but if you're using it as a system drive you'll have lots of random access... = slowdowns. RAID0 is a waste of effort if you ask me. Double failure rate, not much performance boost, and potential for glitches and problems.

 

[sub.mesa]

Nothing wrong with some experimenting. 🙂

Note that a properly setup RAID0 would not just increase sequential speeds; but also increase random IOps; things you might need on a system disk running Windows and other stuff. But the catch is: you need a higher queue depth than 1 to let more than one drive do work at the time; unless you do a lot of writing which already works with a single queue depth due to buffering.

If you want to test out RAID0; then go ahead. Just make sure you have a backup of all important data; a RAID0 of old drives is quite unreliable so make sure you don't burn your fingers while playing with it!

It's a good experience to run some tests yourself, like several benchmarks and some real-world "stopwatch" tests. To do these properly it's a lot of work, though. But if you just want to learn about RAID i see nothing wrong in it.

In the future RAID0 will be used alot more, especially when filesystem-level redundancy introduces itself.