i am thinking about Raiding my HDD

[towhog66]

I have a SSD on the way so i am thinking about using my 2 WD 7200 rpms 16MB Cache in Raid 0. But I have a lot of data on my 2nd hhd that I don't want to lose, so I'm asking well it be lost if i raid them?

Edited August 2, 2012 by towhog66

[Stonerboy779]

Do not go raid 0 if you would like to keep your data.

Raid 0 if something goes wrong everything is lost no redundancies, don't even bother with it at all.

[nickk47]

Well, I keep my data backed up once a week so I really don't worry about losing data. I have mine in Raid 0, and have had it for over 3 years with no problems.

[ir_cow]

to create a raid you need them both blank and once raided if one fails you lose all your data so i suggest you either do raid1 for redundancy (which is slower than a single drive) or back up your data weekly

[Erosannin]

It's too easy but : will it be a 40 or 60 man raid?

 

XD

[Waco]

Don't bother with RAID 0. If anything, do RAID 1 since you don't want to lose your data. Just use the software RAID 1 built into Windows...just make sure you don't mirror the wrong drive.

[Stonerboy779]

It's too easy but : will it be a 40 or 60 man raid?

 

XD

 

Oh OCC how I love you, a place where every forum and sub-forum is the Members Lounge

[Nephilumos]

Do not go raid 0 if you would like to keep your data.

Raid 0 if something goes wrong everything is lost no redundancies, don't even bother with it at all.

 

Don't bother with RAID 0. If anything, do RAID 1 since you don't want to lose your data. Just use the software RAID 1 built into Windows...just make sure you don't mirror the wrong drive.

 

 

RAID 0 is perfectly fine. If a HDD fails in a non-RAID setup, there's a chance that it's going to be just as unrecoverable as a RAID 0 pair where one fails. Not using RAID 0 due to the increased chance of hardware failure simply due to that fact that you are adding a new hard drive into the equation is almost the same as driving a car with 1 wheel because of the increased chance of a blowout if you use 4 wheels.

 

I've used RAID 0 for several years and have had no issues whatsoever and many other people I know who did the same in the past who have moved onto SSD's can echo my sentiment.

 

tl;dr: Suggesting against RAID 0 for failure risk increase reasons is illogical, based in opinion, and should not be used to scare people away from using it.

 

As for the question in the topic, if you've got stuff on one of those hard drives, you'll lose all of that data when you RAID them together.

Edited August 2, 2012 by Nephilumos

[wevsspot]

Neph - I completely agree with your post. I run RAID0 because I can and because it has never given me a single issue in all the years I've ran it. Does it really improve the day to day performance of my computer? No..... but I like to think it does And again, the most important reason is that I can. I loved your analogy about the car and four wheels.

 

Back when many HDD manufacturer's rated their drives in MTBF some of them (WD Enterprise and Black Edition Drives) had MTBF ratings of like 1.2M hours. So even if you cut that in 1/2 it's still 600,000 hours MTBF based on their statistics and internal testing results. So that is still like 68 years. That may be why some manufacturer's (WD for example) began using Component Design Life as the metric instead.

 

My formula for RAID is simple;

Take the warranty period of a single drive and divide in 1/2 and figure that's about when I need to start worrying about a replacement

Have a good backup strategy

[Waco]

Have a good backup strategy

I was trying to point out that running RAID 1 would be a better idea in this case, not that RAID 0 is super risky or anything. The OP doesn't seem to have a real need to run RAID 0 and the increased risk of data loss doesn't warrant the use IMHO (not in this situation) considering that he's got data he doesn't want to lose and, from what I can tell, no current backup strategy.

 

 

I ran RAID 0 for years and never had any issues until I ran my SSDs in RAID 0 and one of them went wonky. Thankfully I had numerous backups but it was a pain trying to get it all sorted out when one of the drives started to produce errors (random crashes, hitches, etc).

[El_Capitan]

RAID 1 is better IMO for HDD's due to the slightly faster disk access time and reads, though you lose half your space you would get in RAID 0.

 

For SSD's, definitely RAID 0. The performance gain for RAID 0 for SSD's is substantially better than RAID 0 for HDD's.

 

I do have two systems with RAID 0 for data storage with SSD's, but because SSD's are more reliable. I do backups of that data, so I'm not worried about data loss.

[Waco]

RAID 1 is better IMO for HDD's due to the slightly faster disk access time and reads, though you lose half your space you would get in RAID 0.

With a good controller the RAID 1 should be just as fast as RAID 0 for reading and roughly as fast as a single drive for writing. I would say the stock AMD/Intel controller falls under the category of "good", at least for a few drives.