RAID 0 on my notebook?

Clawz114

Clawz114

Clawz114

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Ive never installed hard drives in RAID before, but im suddenly thinking about it. I have quite a high spec laptop (Dell XPS M1730) which has 2 hard drive slots and supports RAID, but im currently just using 1 of the slots with a 320GB 7200RPM.

Am i right in thinking that £50 (ish) for another 320GB Seagate is a relatively inexpensive way to speed up the laptop? Basically, i just want to know if i will notice the difference, and is it worth the reinstal of Windows 7?

How much faster is RAID 0 than a single drive?
 
It's a noticeable increase, but you need to weigh up the pros and cons:

pro:
higher sustained reads and transfers

cons:
laptop is heavier
laptop is hotter
laptop battery life is decreased

You'd see a much higher performance increase if you saved that £50, and put it towards an SSD.
 
uv said:
It's a noticeable increase, but you need to weigh up the pros and cons:

pro:
higher sustained reads and transfers

cons:
laptop is heavier
laptop is hotter
laptop battery life is decreased

You'd see a much higher performance increase if you saved that £50, and put it towards an SSD.
Click to expand...

You missed 1 important factor - 2x as likely to lose data should a disk fail in RAID0. This alone for me would make me think twice about RAID0 in a laptop.
 
Meh, raid 0 can fail, so can a normal hdd. Heavier, marginally, hotter, marginally, battery life decreased, not an insignificant amount, its fairly rare for the system disk to spin down in general so you'd have both on all the time. They aren't the loudest part of a laptop but a 7200rpm one could increase the noise.

However, the cheapest SSD's are around, well £50-60 for that Kingston budget ssd, around 40gb, might be the way to go, infact almost certainly is.

Raid 0 will increase sequential speeds, but barely boost the random access performance, and when the laptop takes several seconds to open up a page and takes ages to do 2-3 things at once, its the random access speed thats the problem, not sequential speeds.

An SSD just destroys normal laptop hdd's in performance, and while it would be small, you'll get very responsive and impressive windows performance, and then relegate the current 320GB to storage, thats probably the way to go in this situation.

You'd even see increased battery life as ssd's use less power, and with the 320gb as storage, it would frequently spin down when idle so not use any power.
 
+1 for SSD

Fitted one in a laptop recently and the performance is blowing away the 3ware hardware raid on my butch workstation. So a single SSD is beating 6 x 1TB seagate ES2 drives in RAID 5 on a proper hardware raid controller.
 
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