To RAID or not to RAID?

Guitarman0 · 12 Feb 2010 at 17:41

I have 2 identical WD black caviars (500GB) and I am contemplating weather to put them into RAID 0 or not. I have a separate seagate drive which I could back up onto but I need the 1TB so RAID 1 is ruled out (as either way I want to use the seagate as a backup). I am using my PC for mainly gaming and amateur video editing. Do you guys think I should do it or not?

P.s. if you have had a good/bad experience with RAID0 before please leave a post

d_brennen · 12 Feb 2010 at 17:47

Give it a go. All you have to loose is an evening of testing!

I have been using RAID0 for about a year and a half (now on 3 x 500 Seagate 7200.12 drives) and I have been most impressed so far. Very fast, will try to do some benching this evening. As long as you are aware if one of your dies, thats the whole data set gone!

tibbsey · 12 Feb 2010 at 17:52

As I can't justify the expense of an SSD at the moment, I'm going to be buying another 320GB F1 (have 2 at the moment) and will be raid0 them for os/app/games.

Might even chuck in a 4th, always have other uses for a couple of speedy 320GB drives if I do go SSD in the near future (SSD as boot then a super raid0 for the games

, or upgrade my file server OS drives to a nice little raid0).

Guitarman0 · 12 Feb 2010 at 18:24

d_brennen said:
Give it a go. All you have to loose is an evening of testing!

I have been using RAID0 for about a year and a half (now on 3 x 500 Seagate 7200.12 drives) and I have been most impressed so far. Very fast, will try to do some benching this evening. As long as you are aware if one of your dies, thats the whole data set gone!

As soon as you went RAID did you notice a performance boot straight away?

Thanks for the info!

d_brennen · 12 Feb 2010 at 20:30

Yes... and no. I am coming to the conclusion that 90% of the speed boost is in the noggin. RAID 0 is faster. But how much so depends upon the read/write patterns that the programs/OS you are using.

The biggest speed boost you will see is in synthetic benchies. I also think I have reached the limits of my onboard controller. I doubt 2 7200.12s would be much slower tbh.

Mick-1965 · 13 Feb 2010 at 10:03

The biggest speed boost you will see other than in synthetic benchies. Is if you do video encoding, especially when dealing with raw AVI (1 hour is ~160GB)
It halves even quarters the encoding times as the main bottleneck was the data throughput from the hard disk.

But other than when dealing with very large files you wont get much noticeable difference.