Can i RAID0?

[OzZie]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to all of this RAID business, so you'll have to excuse some of my lack of knowledge

Basically i have two SATA-II hard drives. One is a Samsung 500GB, and the other a Hitachi Desktop 320GB. Both are about a year old and have 16mb cache and are 7200rpm. My motherboard is an Asus P5Q-Pro that has onboard RAID functionality.

I have read about the dangers regarding data loss with RAID0, but in all honestly, it doesnt bother me that much, as everything important to me is backed up on several other mediums. Only OS/Games/Applications will be installed onto these hard drives. However, does RAID0 increase the risk of hard drive failure? At the moment i can't afford any new hard drives should they fail, but i can afford a Windows re-install from time to time.

Also, does it really matter if the hard drives arent identical? I can understand the theory as to why this is important, but performance is still going to be faster than using a single drive surely? Or will RAID not work at all if they are not identical?

Thanks for any help.

 

[knightrider.]

RAID0 doesn't affect the odds of your hard drive failing, but it does double the odds of losing your data because if either drive fails, you lose everything. By moving to RAID0 your drives won't fail any faster, if that's what you mean...

They don't need to be identical drives, but it will affect your RAID array size. With RAID0 the size of the array is (number of drives)*(size of smallest drive) = 640GB in your case.

 

[semi-pro waster]

Basically as knightrider. says, it will work but it is less than ideal to use two non-identical drives, primarily because you run a greater risk that they will start to run out of sync at some point and the array will be broken - you've said that doesn't bother you so that's fine and there isn't a greater risk that the drives will physically die.

As for the speed issue, it depends what you do with your PC whether you will see a noticeable benefit. Raid0 is primarily best for large contiguous blocks of files so video/graphics/audio editing etc are all uses likely to benefit. Personally I didn't notice all that much difference but my uses at the time didn't really fall into any of those categories, I just used a Raid0 array because I could.

 

[OzZie]

Yeah, audio editing is my main purpose, along with small amounts of video and photo editing for my degree course.

Of course, gaming is still something i do from time to time.

Think i may go ahead and just try it. If i like it enough i'll consider getting some new matched hard drives in the future.

Thanks.