Another RAID question

Pooky

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I have two SATA hardrives, one 320gb, the other 160gb.

Now, I'm a noob as I have never heard of RAID before apart from seeing it here and there. Why do people use RAID? Would it benefit me?

Thanks
 
SPEED:

If you run RAID 0, then you make them 2 drives into one large drive.

But, the RAID configuration stores a bit on this drive, then a bit on that drive and then a bit on that drive and then a bit on this drive ....

So, when you write the data to the drive, the write is faster, cos 2 different devices are writing, and when you read, it's faster, cos 2 different devices are reading at the same time.

REDUNDANCY AND READ SPEED:

When you run RAID 1, you're mirroring everything, so, if one drive crashes, then WOOT, everythings on the other drive. And, as an added bonus, when you read, the controller reads parts form that drive, and parts from that drive, so reading is faster.

It gets more complicated.
 
RAID = Redundant Array of Independant Disks or Devices.

Raid is primarily used for data redundancy - If you lose a drive, your data is still there, and you can have the faulty drive replaced and re-integrated to the raid array without losing your data...

There are different rail levels which serve different purposes.

Raid0 for instance splits your data across multiple drives (and allows you to access that data faster as you are getting little bits from multiple drives at the same time, instead of from one drive), but if you lose one of those drives, you lose all of your data.

Ok, thats enough spoon-feeding... Go google, or checkout Wikipedia!

Gah: Stoke beat me to it.
 
So would you reccomend RAID 0/ Is the speed increase significant? Is it easy to do?
 
Well, for raid 1 you have to have 2 identical drives, so, that's out of the question for you.

Your controller may not like your hard drives as well, just to make your life more interesting.

And, with a raid 0, if the set fails .. you're losing the entire 2 disks worth of data.

I would never use raid 0 unless it's for temporary stuff, i hate losing stuff.
I use RAID 1.

The speed improvement ... aaaarg ... the prufe is in the pudding.
Probably like just less than 1/3 faster read time.
 
So it's prob better to have two different hardrives? One for the OS and Games and Apps, the other for movies and music/
 
if you have 2 drives of different size but same speed u can run raid 1 but the partitions maximum size will be the size of the smaller disk if u run raid1
 
If you want the speed improvement then the answer is no, it's not better to RAID them.
If you're fine with the default speed of the drives, then the answer is yes, it's better to NOT raid them.

I enjoy the just under 1/3 faster load time I get when a Battlefield 2 map is loading.
 
raid is amazing if you ask me :)

things happen so much faster

but not more than 2 x 160 gig is advised

buy another 160 gig drive and raid 0 with 128 or 64k stripe

believe the performance of raid is so fast

just dont store important info on the raid disk
 
Surely if he does RAID 0 with two drives of a different size, he will only use the lower amount from each drive (160 in this case) thus making the total 320 (160+160)? Would be a bit of a waste...
 
Surely if he does RAID 0 with two drives of a different size, he will only use the lower amount from each drive (160 in this case) thus making the total 320 (160+160)? Would be a bit of a waste...

Affirmative...!

Some of the more advanced controllers will allow you to get to that extra unused bit on the one drive, but to be honest, its easier, and cheaper to buy lots more drives!
 
I run RAID 0 with 2 160gbs on Vista, moving & installing files around the drives is A LOT faster, access time is more or less the same, if you want a higher access time get a WD Raptor.
 
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