Raid Or Not Raid

swiftylee

swiftylee

swiftylee

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Joined
3 Feb 2011
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2
H i have put together my brimming box with asus crosshair 890fx amd 1100t, 560 gtx overclocked edition, 2 samsung f3 1tb hd.

should i set up a raid? is it going to make any difference? how is the best way?

never done it before...

thanks
 
If youve already set it up, its probably not worth re-installing, though if you havent installed yet you have 2 options, RAID0 or RAID1, RAID0 has the better performance increase but if either drive fails you lose everything, as such you have doubled your chance of failiure, RAID1 has marginal performance benefits but protects against such failiures as each disk mirrors what the other has on it, so if one drive fails, you still have the data on the other drive. So it depends what you want from your RAID, note however RAID1 is not the same as back up and does not prevent against corruption, if files become corrupt you still lose the data, it merely protects against drive failiure
 
I regularly use RAID 0 on my PCs as this does give a noticeable boost for the kind of applications I use (which do lots of large file operations). Personally I don't see much difference between the risk of a drive failing and losing half of you files or losing them all in a RAID 0 setup. Both cases are a real nuisance and either you have a backup or not ;)

If you've not got the OS installed yet, and are comfortable with the slight extra risk, then I would do trial installs of Windows and you key applications with and without RAID (and possibly different block sizes) to see if you notice a worthwhile gain. Otherwise I would save the time and wait until you can get an SSD which will give a very noticeable gain.
 
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