Wanting Raid have some questions.

[Xerco]

Hi, my computer has been lacking in harddrive speed for a while but im not quite blown away by the SSD's yet and they are dropping so quickly in price.

I was thinking of setting up RAID 0 (this is the performance one right?)

But how dangerouse can it be?

Do I need to have identical harddrives (Samsung F3 1TB)?

Should I have Hardware Based Raid or "OS Based Raid".

And lastly my current hard drive, the F3 1TB is now a couple of years old, would getting a brand new one as RAID mess this up or cause any problems?

Thanks for your help

 

[ChileanLlama]

You'd be better off with SSD.

RAID0 or striping is what you're after. It's not dangerous. There's more risk of data loss. Data is shared across both drives in the RAID. If one drive fails all data is lost.

The drives don't need to be identical, but you should aim to have similar performance, i.e. same RPM, same cache etc. If not, the array will only operate as fast as the slowest drive in the array.

Hardware based RAID is preferred for performance. It's not really worth while using the OS based RAID options for striping.

...and after all that buy an SSD - still much faster, not least because of the access times, than a RAID0 array (unless you put a silly amount of drives in the RAID0 )