To Raid or not to RAID

[Urban_Squrill]

I am getting another hd so i will have 4 hds and more then enought space. I want to raid 2 80gb hd. I have never messed with this and want to try. I know I need a card. I was thinking RAID 0. Should I do this? Any more info should I know before doing this? Pro Cons of RAid 0. Its faster I know but for everything(games photoshop and so on).

TO RAID or not to RAID

[[Neo770]]

I would RAID, its nice and fast.The only thing I hate about it is that an error on one disk means that all the data on the array is gone. This happened to me twice when i was using raid, so just make sure its backed up often.

[Scott Tiger]

I think it depends on how you set your RAID up. If you're striping your disks then you're putting yourself at a greater risk since you have 2x the chance of losing one. Now if you're using mirroring you're not going to get the full advantages of striping but you have 1/2x the chance of losing your data due to a disk failure since you have two disks with the same data.

I've always wanted a RAID setup myself. Once I get some money I'm going to look into getting a second WD 80gb SE and then mirror them. I should get faster read times so programs and games should load faster (though my write times should show no improvement at all).

[Siliconjunkie]

For the datas sake, unless you have single files or contiguous file systems greater than the size of one drive, I would just use them seperately.

With 2000 (and XP I think) you can mount a drive as a folder as well, making it invisible.

[wctyler]

I love the speed of RAID. I'd go for it. I did with this new PC I built.

[Siliconjunkie]

Alot of what I have read indicates that there is little to no speed gain with IDE raid. Some reviews have even noticed slower performance. I can't find any linkage at the moment.

I have nothing against it, but when I ran it I noticed no real performance gains. I have them as individual drives now.

One big concern that I have is it makes drive upgrades much more difficult, since you cant simply plug a new one in and copy to it. Ghost and the like wont see it.

Also, you will most likely have to provide windows with drivers when you install.

[Scott Tiger]

Providing Windows with drivers in no problem for me. I don't use Ghost or any other imaging tool when I install my OS so that's not a problem either.

While I'm not argueing here I have used a computer with IDE Raid before (the drives were mirrored, not striped) and the performance differences when launching applications was very noticable. And this wasn't a powerful pc either. I think it was a k2-500, nothing to brag about. So I guess it comes down to choice. I can't afford a SCSI drive array (and I won't likely be able to in the near future either) but I will probably be able to afford a second IDE drive and a mobo with IDE RAID built in.

That's just my observations for that once pc I used with it. Yours could be totally different.

[jmichna]

With an add-in RAID IDE controller you will see performance benefits from RAID (onboard RAID performance gains are somewhat debatable, as others have mentioned).

With your 4 drives -- assuming they are the same size and speed -- I'd suggest considering RAID 0+1. This will give you the speed/performance advantages of striping (RAID-0) plus the data redundancy of RAID-1 (mirroring). RAID-0+1 will give you almost the same performance as plain striping (RAID-0) but be much more disaster-tolerant. If one drive goes down, you'll get a message in BIOS during bootup letting you know that a drive needs to be replaced. You won't lose everything, as you would if running RAID-0 only.

Just my $0.02

[Urban_Squrill]

Well I will be Running s 80's a 120 and a 40. I would love to do 0+1 but dont have drive's.
But what is the likelyhood of a hd crashing?

[Siliconjunkie]

Fairly good. At some point one will fail.