To RAID or not to RAID?

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Here is the question... :)

I'm just in the planning phase for a new build I'll be doing in the near future. I'll be using 2 250GB Seagate SATA drives for storage, recycled from my current system. I'm just in two minds as to how to use them most effectively though. At present, I'm running the two drives as a 500GB RAID 0, backing up to a NAS box. This works ok, but the backup is slow, and I can't help feeling I don't really use my PC in a way which would warrant RAID 0. I've heard performance gains are pretty meager in reality.

The main disk performance-related uses of my PC are the odd bit of gaming (loading maps/textures), opening smallish photoshop files, and loading Windows itself. I can't really think of anything else I do that would stress the HDDs to any great extent. More to the point, I am thinking the performance gain I would notice in upgrading from my current 2GB of DDR1 (running Vista) to something a bit beefier would outweigh any gain from RAID 0 anyway. Would I be right?

So, I'm looking for some advice on whether to ditch RAID altogether. Instead, I would run everything off a single 250GB HDD. This would leave me with about 120GB free to play with...should keep me happy for quite a while. The second 250GB HDD would then be put to use as a fast local clone backup, saving a hell of a lot of time in network file transfers. This would then clone itself occasionally to the NAS box which sits elsewhere.

Does this sound sensible?

Cheers guys.
 
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It is only worth while to run a RAID0 set up if you are copying/moving a lot of large files (ie. 4GB+ video files), or unzipping many compressed files, otherwise RAID0 has no real performance gain.

Or if you want a bit more performance from a single HDD, buy a single platter Samsung F1 (320GB), or a 640GB WD AAKS...

Upgrading your ram from 2GB to 4GB (with Vista) will certainly be noticeable, and of a lot more use to you than RAID0...
 
From my experience RAID 0 gives very noticable performance gain in things like OS boot, applications launch time, game level loading times etc. I mean RAID 0 is definitely noticable even on mobo built-in RAID controller. Your risk is only having an hdd fail that would obviously make you loose all raid data.
If you are willing to spend some money on external RAID controller it would speed the things up even more. With external controller you can have cool things like RAID 5 that is as fast as RAID 0 and as reliable as RAID 1.
 
Hi this is my first RAID 0 setup, on my new system, I RAIDED 2 Samsung F1 320 and I must say things are very fast, I would have NO hesitation recommending you do that, I also have a Samsung F1 640 as extra storage. so far NO problems!! :D
 
Oh yes RAID 0 does give performance gains. I just put in a pair of SSD's as boot and application drive array on RAID 0 and they absolutely fly. Testing with ATTO benchmark shows I'm getting 360mb/s read and 300mb/s write, nearly double the quoted max speed of a single SSD. See my posts in this thread for details and screenshots. :D:D

Best upgrade I ever did.
 
If you are happy to operate with one 250 hdd and the other as back up why dont you just go to raid 1 instead of ditching raid? This way you will have the added safety from raid 1 and the space u say you can live with while still close to maintaining the read speeds achieved in raid 0.

The RAM will be a definate noticable upgrade but why downgrade hard drive performance, should stop any bottle necks in future for you.
 
I always RAID0 tbh. It is so much noticably faster in pretty much everything that I have to now-a-days. Its just whether you can be arsed with potential loss of data as Ive had a drive fail on me before in the past and lost the array which meant all my data was gone!
 
chrismcca said:
If you are happy to operate with one 250 hdd and the other as back up why dont you just go to raid 1 instead of ditching raid? This way you will have the added safety from raid 1 and the space u say you can live with while still close to maintaining the read speeds achieved in raid 0.

The RAM will be a definate noticable upgrade but why downgrade hard drive performance, should stop any bottle necks in future for you.
Click to expand...

RAID1 would give me hardware redundancy, but I already have that from my NAS. What I am looking for is the ability to incrementally backup data.

There are a fair few mixed viewpoints in this this thread. I'm still uncertain as to whether there is much point in RAID0. Another option would be to keep the RAID0 and purchase a 500GB firewire/USB external HDD as a backup.
 
tim80bwi said:
Another option would be to keep the RAID0 and purchase a 500GB firewire/USB external HDD as a backup.
Click to expand...

tbh that might well be your cheapest and easiest solution, I guess it all comes down to how much drama it would be to lose your data and what value you place on it.
 
tim80bwi said:
RAID1 would give me hardware redundancy, but I already have that from my NAS. What I am looking for is the ability to incrementally backup data.

There are a fair few mixed viewpoints in this this thread. I'm still uncertain as to whether there is much point in RAID0. Another option would be to keep the RAID0 and purchase a 500GB firewire/USB external HDD as a backup.
Click to expand...

If you are after something to incrementally backup you data to another drive you could try:

xxcopy - kind of the DOS xcopy command on speed. Comand line based and a wealth of configuration options. I use it to keep a clone of my data files on another drive. Very quick at finding all the changed files.

Microsofts SyncToy - One of their free powertoys. GUI and used for keeping two storage areas in synch.
 
I have got 2 velociraptors in raid 0 and before that i had 2 raptor 74gigs in 0 aswell, wouldnt do anything else tbh, then get another drive for a bit of extra storage
 
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