Noob raid0 question

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Hey mates,
I have never had a raid setup but was thinking about getting one. If I understand it correctly raid0 will divide files between the 3 (if I was using 3 drives for instance) drives so it can read the separate parts at the same time to make the reads faster. So does that mean that 3 30gb drives will give me 90 total gb's? Sorry if my question is retarded in advance.
 
Yep. Three 30GB drives in RAID0 will give you one combined 90GB drive, that is faster than a single drive. If you put them in RAID1, you will only get 30GB from all three drives, but if one of the disks fails, you will still keep the data.
 
Hi, yes raid0 array makes all the physical drives behave like they are one 90GB HD. The drawback is you increase 3x the risk of loosing all your data - if 1 drive fails the data is lost on all of them. Raid1 array would mirror the data so a backup would be created each time a file is written and would be 30GB in size.
 
As far as losing data, it's just an OS drive. all my important data is stored on a 500gb hd green. I wanted ssd to mainly speed up load times on program starts. Music/Movies, I don't mind waiting the exta .5 secs it takes to retrieve files on cold read. Chances are my media player is opened most of the time so it's a moot issue.
 
yes but only 83gb will be usable

With the OCZ Vertex's they mark them as 30Gb, 60Gb etc as they are quoting the actual capacity in Gb rather than the std 32Gb, 64Gb etc which is quoted by other manufacturers and needs binary conversion to get the true figure.

I have 3 x 30Gb Vertex's and in Windows Explorer they show as 89.4Gb available, the remainder being taken by the RAId info etc.

As the OP was specifically asking about 3 x 30Gb drives I would assume he's talking about Vertex's, so the info above is what you need.
 
I was thinking of going for RAID 0 myself in my next system, does the speed increase really seem that noticable though? I mean day to day, general stuff and gaming, not fumark etc.

Tried to find some reviews, comparisons etc. online and not found much, if anyone has any links to articles please post.

Thanks.
 
I was thinking of going for RAID 0 myself in my next system, does the speed increase really seem that noticable though? I mean day to day, general stuff and gaming, not fumark etc.

Tried to find some reviews, comparisons etc. online and not found much, if anyone has any links to articles please post.

Thanks.

No links I'm afraid, just personal experience. At work we use quite a few fairly high end systems for various roles such as CAD, 3D modelling, GIS etc and most of them do have a pair of small-ish mechanical HDD's in RAID0 for OS and apps, with a single larger drive for data storage. There is definitely a performance boost with this setup, but like all these things you quickly become used to it and therefore dont really notice it in day to day usage UNTIL it goes wrong and you're left on a PC with a traditional single drive for everything setup!

With SSD's things get even better as they scale so well and the speed increase is imo even more appreciable, whether this is due to them having access times of around 0.1ms rather than the 8.9ms or so that's usual for std HDD's I'm not sure - others will no doubt know better than I.

Anyway, yes there is an overall day-to-day performance boost but it soon doesn't feel like it... if that makes sense?!
 
Think I understand what you mean, just has that generally nippy feeling and responsiveness? Kind of like when you use XP after Vista :)

Never done a RAID before so think I'll give it a shot for the experience, the SSD's would be great but bit overpriced at the moment, true they have come down a lot but I think I'll give it a year before making the switch.

Cheers mate.
 
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