RAID 0 - advice

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0ilslick

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Hi guys,

I'm looking at setting up RAID 0 with two 80GB Seagate HDDs. It will just be for Windows 7 and programs - I'll have all of my data stored on a seperate HDD, so if one of the RAID HDDs fails I won't lose any important data.

Will there be a noticeable difference in Windows (boot up times, responsiveness, etc.)? I'm buying the HDDs second hand, so I could either buy two 80GB HDDs or a single 320GB HDD. Would it be worthwhile to go for the RAID setup?

Thanks :)
 
Last edited:
RAID 0 is striping, where the 2 disks are made into one disk. RAID 0 offers no redundancy.
RAID 1 is mirror, where both disks are kept in-sync with each other.

Reading time on the RAID 1 should be around 10% faster because the controller can read from different sectors on each disk at the same time, depending on how well the RAID controller is programmed.
Writing time on the RAID 1 will be the same as writing time on a single disk, with probably a 4% overhead cost as both disks usually are allowed to finish writing before the computer is sent a success code.
 
davemc said:
RAID 0 is striping, where the 2 disks are made into one disk. RAID 0 offers no redundancy.
RAID 1 is mirror, where both disks are kept in-sync with each other.

Reading time on the RAID 1 should be around 10% faster because the controller can read from different sectors on each disk at the same time, depending on how well the RAID controller is programmed.
Writing time on the RAID 1 will be the same as writing time on a single disk, with probably a 4% overhead cost as both disks usually are allowed to finish writing before the computer is sent a success code.
Click to expand...

With that said, RAID 0 is almost twice as fast read/write as a single hard drive?
 
Raid 0 works well for me - just as said before if one drive fails the whole thing crashes...

Agree on the 20% improvement, maybe 2X SSD drives in RAID 0 will blow your hair back a little more...
 
davemc said:
Should be, but I have never seen anything more than a 20% improvement.
Then again, I am not using top end RAID controllers.
Click to expand...

Ah I see. I did notice a absolutely astronomical performance boost when I set 4 x 80GB SATAII Seagate drives up in a RAID. Striped over all the disks with an Intel RAID controller
 
0ilslick said:
Hi guys,

I'm looking at setting up RAID 0 with two 80GB Seagate HDDs. It will just be for Windows 7 and programs, so if one of them fails I won't lose any important data.

Will there be a noticeable difference in Windows (boot up times, responsiveness, etc.)? I'm buying the HDDs second hand, so I could either buy two 80GB HDDs or a single 320GB HDD. Would it be worthwhile to go for the RAID setup?

Thanks :)
Click to expand...

Sorry but I don't quite get your logic, you want to set up redundancy to protect your data and in the next paragraph you're buying 2nd Hand hard drives. :wtf:
 
Drake2007 said:
Sorry but I don't quite get your logic, you want to set up redundancy to protect your data and in the next paragraph you're buying 2nd Hand hard drives. :wtf:
Click to expand...

Oh ya, I should probably change the wording. I meant that I'll only have windows and programs installed on the raid setup and I'll keep all of my important data on a seperate HDD, so that if one of the RAID HDDs fails then I won't lose any important data.
 
davemc said:
Should be, but I have never seen anything more than a 20% improvement.
Then again, I am not using top end RAID controllers.
Click to expand...

+1 I also set it up with 2x 320GB drives and didn't really notice the speed difference.

Drake2007 said:
Sorry but I don't quite get your logic, you want to set up redundancy to protect your data and in the next paragraph you're buying 2nd Hand hard drives. :wtf:
Click to expand...

He is not doing it for redundancy but rather for speed.
 
Buying a SSD or bigger hard drive would give you a greater performance increase than going for a RAID setup with 2 small hard drives.
 
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