RAID 0, is it worth it?

[Guitarman0]

I managed to get hold of a second 500GB western digital black caviar and am just wondering, would it be worth going RAID 0? How much of a performance increase would I see? Is it really worth the effort of a clean install? Thanks.

 

[pimper]

It is worth it cos you should see an increase in speed, though it wont be massive, its just the danger of Raid 0 u will lose everything on the disks if anything happens.

 

[Angst]

if you have a third hdd for backup then yes raid0 will be worth if but if not personally i wouldn't risk it. whether it is worth a clean install is your opinion but you will see increased responsiveness.

 

[Louis_Y]

I ran RAID 0 for quite a while and tbh the performance increase is minimal and is far outweighed by the hassle, especially if you're using onboard raid rather than a separate RAID controller. Dropping back to a non-RAID setup and I honestly haven't noticed any drop in performance, although if I sat around with a stopwatch I might notice the odd tenth of a second type thing. If you change motherboard chipset, you're probably going to have to back everything up and rebuild your array on the new board then restore. Also, as pointed out above, if either disk has issues you could end up losing the whole array. I'd just add the new disk as an additional drive. YMMV of course

 

[tibbsey]

I ran RAID 0 for quite a while and tbh the performance increase is minimal and is far outweighed by the hassle, especially if you're using onboard raid rather than a separate RAID controller. Dropping back to a non-RAID setup and I honestly haven't noticed any drop in performance, although if I sat around with a stopwatch I might notice the odd tenth of a second type thing.

This is exactly what I found.

I ran 2 Samsung 320GBs in raid 0 (with OS, apps and games installed), and while it was all very nice, the poo onboard controller on my motherboard took a while to initialise the raid each boot. Any boot time decrease I might have had due to the speed increase from the raid was taken away because it was taking that time to initialise the raid.

I now run the 2 320GBs separately, one with OS and apps on it, and the other solely for games. Load times are nippyish for OS and great for games.

 

[pat_c]

For mechanical HDD - probably not worth the time, trouble and risk - for SSD... so total worth it !

 

[Avezius]

For mechanical HDD - probably not worth the time, trouble and risk - for SSD... so total worth it !

....but you couldnt use TRIM with SSD's in Raid I think (no TRIM = reduced speed over time as previously used blocks are not reused - Link).

Also I would have thought SSD was quick enough without Raid (I hope so anyway!).

Dan

 

[quadcore]

2 x HDD's for the new system. 1 Barracuda 32mb 1 TB and the other a 150GB VelociRaptor.
My plan was to use the smaller for system/apps n games (C) and the other for everything else. Is this OK?