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Is RAID 0 worth it?


Sivartus

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Ok, I have heard alot of mixed reviews about the benefits/dangers of RAID 0 in all aspects: gaming, general use, ect (I am going to RAID 0 two Raptors btw). Alot of people say that raiding two drives increases the speed alot, and that it is worth the cost of two drives. Other people say don't get two drives, just get one drive.

 

I have even seen mixed articles online. Some say its worth it, some say its not.

 

So, is RAID 0 worth the extra cost of two drives, or is getting just one drive better?

 

Also, I am looking to cut off some money. Would raiding two 36gb drive be faster than one 74gb?

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It would mostly depend on your needs. Everyday apps don't benifit from it. In gaming it helps by loading maps faster and coupled with large amounts of memory allow to hit the ground running when you first spawn in.

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Guest Timmay

In Reply To #1,

 

I have seen benchmarks where 2 Hiatche (sp) drives have kept up with Raptors, not in seek time due to the faster platter speeds of the raptors. Remember for what ever your paying for a 74GB raptor you can probably pick up 2 very good 80GB drives and RAID 0 them, That would be much faster then a single Raptor. So for the price of 2 Raptors, you could have 4 80GB drives so you would have double the space and still more performance.

 

But indeed yes you have 2x the chance of a failure, But to be honest and from experience - A drive will pretty much fail straight away or not for many many years.

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In Reply To #1,

 

I have seen benchmarks where 2 Hiatche (sp) drives have kept up with Raptors, not in seek time due to the faster platter speeds of the raptors. Remember for what ever your paying for a 74GB raptor you can probably pick up 2 very good 80GB drives and RAID 0 them, That would be much faster then a single Raptor. So for the price of 2 Raptors, you could have 4 80GB drives so you would have double the space and still more performance.

 

But indeed yes you have 2x the chance of a failure, But to be honest and from experience - A drive will pretty much fail straight away or not for many many years.

 

yup if one drive dies in raid 0 then your screwed... i like raid 1 even though its not as fast as 0. 1 offers more protection than 0. but to answer your question if you like performance and dont rly care about losing all the data (im assuming youre not storing irreplaceable data) then yes by all means go for raid 0

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Raid 0 is the way to go for non-critical data storage.. It's a good bit faster than a single drive..

 

Raid with Raptor discs on the other hand I'm not so sure about.. Raptors are the fastest yes, but they are not so much faster as to justify their price.. You save perhaps 1 second loading a map in a game, and maybe 5 seconds booting up at the MOST.. But those precious few seconds are spend again maintaining a bit of free space and uninstalling games to get room for others..

 

Personally I'd build a raid 0 system from 16mb cache 250/300 gig SATA-II discs.. You can get 1TB with that for the same price as 2*150gb Raptors..

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