Raid0 and separate independant.

Gaidin109 · 29 Sep 2009 at 20:01

Can I set up a raid 0 with 2x 1TB F3's and then have a 1.5TB seagate set independently. Currently using gigabyte UD5 Mobo and have a F1 750Gb and seagate 750Gb set up as independant drives. I dont have much experience of raid on PC's.

setter · 29 Sep 2009 at 20:14

Yep, first setup the raid array, install the os onto it then add the other drives, format each under disk management.

DIABLO · 29 Sep 2009 at 20:48

You could even get another 1.5TB drive and have a RAID 1 array as well as the RAID 0 for backup purposes.

Gaidin109 · 29 Sep 2009 at 21:42

That's cool. I don't want a raid 1 as the 1.5gb drive is a junk drive, just to shove stuff like vids and music and stuff. I want the raid 0 for the performance increase over a single drive. Cheers for the help.

Jimbo Mahoney · 1 Oct 2009 at 09:27

What applications are you hoping to improve with RAID 0? I was disappointed when I was using RAID 0 for games.

Gaidin109 · 1 Oct 2009 at 20:02

no real specific application. just never done it on a PC. thought it would make it quicker over all.

bulldog147 · 1 Oct 2009 at 20:14

Gaidin109 said:
no real specific application. just never done it on a PC. thought it would make it quicker over all.

Just be careful with RAID0 - any error on it, will result the loss of operating system on raid0. The performance would be lot better go for 2 x SSD's.

Gaidin109 · 1 Oct 2009 at 20:34

SSD's are too expensive and can be unreliable. Raid will be ok, I will also have a 1.5Gb drive for backing up music etc.

ChileanLlama · 1 Oct 2009 at 20:36

Gaidin109 said:
SSD's are too expensive and can be unreliable. Raid will be ok, I will also have a 1.5Gb drive for backing up music etc.

What makes you think they are unreliable?

rexehuk · 1 Oct 2009 at 20:38

SSD lifetime is like 170 years... How you mean they are unreliable?

bulldog147 · 1 Oct 2009 at 20:41

SSD's is very reliable now otherwise they wouldn't sell it in the market if it was unreliable! I had 3 x SSD's and had no problem at all.

Gaidin109 · 2 Oct 2009 at 05:56

We've used some at work, (when I say some, over 1000) and we have had a failure rate of around 17%, this could be a bad batch, but it doesnt inspire confidence. But regardless of this, they are too expensive anyway. £300-£500 for 256Gb is a bit steep at retail when compared to 1TB HDD's. Also OS stutter, and no way to recover lost data, failure due to stong magnetic fields etc. I've read reports of some SSD's losing performance drastically when the OS is reinstalled as well. I'll stick with Raid HDD for now.

ChileanLlama · 2 Oct 2009 at 16:22

Gaidin109 said:
We've used some at work, (when I say some, over 1000) and we have had a failure rate of around 17%, this could be a bad batch, but it doesnt inspire confidence. But regardless of this, they are too expensive anyway. £300-£500 for 256Gb is a bit steep at retail when compared to 1TB HDD's. Also OS stutter, and no way to recover lost data, failure due to stong magnetic fields etc. I've read reports of some SSD's losing performance drastically when the OS is reinstalled as well. I'll stick with Raid HDD for now.

That's fair enough if you have the experience. It doesn't seem to be common as I've not seen other reports of high failure rates when i was looking into them before I bought some.

As for price and size, I can't argue that. That's totally subjective to each and every individual as to whether they can justify the price - but I would argue that performance needs to be taken into the equation, not purely size and price.

OS stutter. This seems to be common with the JMicron controller drives which were common at the "cheap" end of the market before the current Intel, Samsung and Indilinx drives were launched. I've not used one, but by all accounts I would seriously avoid a JMicron drive - if this was my only option the stuttering alone would have kept me on HDs. Thankfully, there doesn't seem to be much reason to opt for one of these drives now.

I use my drives for OS, Apps, Games and temporary files. It is all imaged and backed up so file recovery is not an issue - plus I think in the last 10-15 years I've only had to recover files twice - but actually I didn't know this was the case so learnt something new!!!

Finally, the lost performance needs to be put into perspective - and I see this a lot on here. With the newer SSDs even a very dirty drive is going to perform better than HDs, and with Windows 7 and confirmed support for most of the current crop of drives getting TRIM even this degradation over time will be less of an issue.