Pros and Cons of RAID 0 ?

[Defenestration]

My system recently went tits-up and I'm now considering having a RAID 0 set-up for the hard drives for improved performance. I've never personally had a hard drive fail on me and so I'm not overly worried about the fact that if one drive fails, the whole RAID drive fails, although I'm still interested in hearing from people who have suffered from this problem (along with the make and model of the drive that failed).

I've read conflicting reports about the performance gains, with some people saying the gains are minimal, while others saying the gains are great. With hardware based RAID 0 I would expect the performance increase to be nearly double that of a non-RAID 0 system.

I wanted to hear from people who are running RAID 0 systems exactly how much better/faster a RAID 0 system is, including a rough percentage of the increases in performance that can be expected. I'd also like to hear of any downsides (if any).

Lastly, can I set-up more than 2 drives in a RAID 0 configuration as a lot of the new PC's seem to support at least 4 SATA drives, so would I be able to set-up these 4 drives in RAID 0 to act as a single drive ?

[Peter2150]

Hi Defenestration

I have had Raid 0 on two machines now. 1st was a laptop, and i also put it on a new desktop I just bought. I put 2 250gb Western Digital 7200 rpm drives in raid 0 in it, and a 3rd as a 2nd drive. It's fast.

I did some research, and I think you end up with about a 20-25% performance gain.

Only think I considered was being sure I bought from someone who probably had good experience in high performance machines. In my case it was velocitymicro who builds gaming machines.

For me the raid is totally transparant. I use FDISR, IFW/IFD and perfect disk defragger with no problems.

Pete

[Stem]

-{ Quote: "can I set-up more than 2 drives in a RAID 0 configuration as a lot of the new PC's seem to support at least 4 SATA drives, so would I be able to set-up these 4 drives in RAID 0 to act as a single drive ?" }-Maximum 2 drives for raid 0, you need raid 5 for striping 3 or more drives.

[Devinco]

Not worth it for the small performance increase.
Rather go for increasing the drive's RPM, size, or use the second drive as a backup drive.
If you can have only two drives, it is worth more to use the second drive as a backup than to go RAID 1 or RAID 0.

Here is an old but still valid article:
Are two drives better than one? (http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101)

Current motherboards have multiple RAID controllers but usually only 2 drives per controller (and array).

[Stem]

-{ Quote: "Current motherboards have multiple RAID controllers but usually only 2 drives per controller (and array)." }-On the systems I have, I have only the "Silicon Image 3114R controller" that supports Raid 5, but never used it.

The only time I used raid was when I was doing a lot of video editing, and had 2 raid 0 sets (The transfer rates between raid sets was a big improvement for video editing)

[Beer Dog]

-{ Quote: "Maximum 2 drives for raid 0, you need raid 5 for striping 3 or more drives." }-

Shouldn't that be a Minimum of 2 drives for RAID 0?

RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 drives.

[Devinco]

-{ Quote: "The only time I used raid was when I was doing a lot of video editing, and had 2 raid 0 sets (The transfer rates between raid sets was a big improvement for video editing)" }-
I agree, video editing would benefit from a striped RAID 0 array.
Although with today's 10K+ RPM drives you could get started with DV editing without RAID.
But if the OP wants to edit video, he should consider having it on a separate drive/array from the OS drive.

[Peter2150]

-{ Quote: "I agree, video editing would benefit from a striped RAID 0 array.
Although with today's 10K+ RPM drives you could get started with DV editing without RAID.
But if the OP wants to edit video, he should consider having it on a separate drive/array from the OS drive." }-

Before ordering my system, I did some research on the different WD drives. Found a couple of tests that showed if you used the 7200 rpm drives in raid 0 you gained about 20-25% over the single drive. Like wise the 10000rpm drives showed about the same improvement, and by putting the 10000rpm drives in raid 0 you gained about the same amount again. Based on those tests and my requirements I went with the 7200 rpm drives in raid 0

[Devinco]

-{ Quote: "Before ordering my system, I did some research on the different WD drives. Found a couple of tests that showed if you used the 7200 rpm drives in raid 0 you gained about 20-25% over the single drive. Like wise the 10000rpm drives showed about the same improvement, and by putting the 10000rpm drives in raid 0 you gained about the same amount again. Based on those tests and my requirements I went with the 7200 rpm drives in raid 0" }-In the article I linked to, it shows that the test results widely varied from about 2%-38% depending on the type of activity being done.
Any type of heavy Audio/Video work will benefit.
Everything else was just not worth the small improvement.