What are the benefits of having RAID 0?

[ShaunyR]

I was thinking about getting another hard drive because my is filling up at a rapid rate and was wondering what the benefits of getting an identical hard drive and running RAID 0 would be? Would this be easy to setup? Thanks for any help!

 

[Rapsven]

If you needed to ask, you don't need it.

 

[D1gger]

To install a 2nd drive and convert to RAID 0 you would have to ghost your current system, install the drive, set up the raid in bios and then reload from your ghost. As far as the benefits, you are not likely to notice any speed improvement unless you work with a lot of large files, such as video or audio.

I actually spent yesterday dismantling my RAID 0 system because it was causing more grief than benefits. I wanted to have a tri-boot system with Win/XP Pro, Fedora Core 3 64-bit & Win/XP Pro 64-bit. The problem was, they all recognized the drive configuration differently, and I couldn't get the boot loader to work properly until I configured the two raptor drives as separate drives, rather than one RAID 0 array.

In addition, a RAID 0 array is twice as likely to have a catastrophic failure than a single drive.

 

[CrackRabbit]

Running the risk of losing all your data in a single unexpected event!
.... wait thats not a feature....

 

[aixenv]

well he did ask the benefit

Raid0 is faster, however not that much that you'd notice some huge difference in this day and age;

the downfall is if the raid0 setup gets hosed so does all your XXXgb of data, i'd suggest if you can go raid 5 or atleast do some type of mirroring to protect your data, personally speaking for my gaming systems i go raid0, and then have veritas for system backup to my super dlt and dont have to worry about the loss of data but then everyone doesnt have that option, but then for a home / gaming system whats the worst that can happen you reinstall xp, sp2, and a few games, but then again the speed gain isnt maybe worth that headache, stick with a mirror setup or just dont raid at all

and i'll say this in all my years of dealing with raids i've only had 1 system have a problem with it's raid0 and that was the fact both harddrives crashed ( go figure ) so raid 0 or raid 1 wouldnt have made much difference...the odds of your raid0 getting hosed are very slim, or atleat maybe i've just had good luck these last 20 years..