Does Tomshardware Recommend RAID?

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RaccoonPete

RaccoonPete

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Jun 29, 2013
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As the title suggests I am interested in the RAID feature when building my new PC. What I would like to know is does Tomshardware suggest RAID? Is there any significant difference in performance when using it? I do realize that there are a few different versions of RAID and would like to know which one is best. I use my computer primarily for gaming and small programming projects and will be using a 128 GB 830 Samsung SSD and Western Digital Caviar Black (Want 3 TB, doesn't matter if spread out over multiple devices). Thanks in advance!
 
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J

I only use a Raid-0 and yes, there is a lot of diference running 2 hard disk alone or in raid-0 with a good controller.



Depends
Raid-0: Stripe, pure speed (read and write) at the cost of reliability (double chance, or triple or whatever chance of loosing all the hard disk content).
Raid-1: Mirroring, allways have a copy of the data even in the chance of loosing a hard drive, usually improve performance in reading but not in writing, loose the 50% (with two disk) of the storage capacity.
Raid-5: Parity, allows loosing one of the disk installed (the more...
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juanrdp

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I only use a Raid-0 and yes, there is a lot of diference running 2 hard disk alone or in raid-0 with a good controller.



Depends
Raid-0: Stripe, pure speed (read and write) at the cost of reliability (double chance, or triple or whatever chance of loosing all the hard disk content).
Raid-1: Mirroring, allways have a copy of the data even in the chance of loosing a hard drive, usually improve performance in reading but not in writing, loose the 50% (with two disk) of the storage capacity.
Raid-5: Parity, allows loosing one of the disk installed (the more the disk the less the % you loose), improve in reading performance depends on the controller (need to calculate the parity to check data consistency, usually you have an improvement) but also on write usually you have a loose in performance due the parity calcualtions.



You cannot Raid that kind of devices, need two similar ones, (two HDDs or two SSD but in this case be sure that your board controller allow trim transferences tru the raid or the SSD would loose performance), but is no way that you could Raid a SSD with an HDD.

For example i use a SSD as bood device and two HDDs in raid-0 to improve the performance.

 
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RaccoonPete

RaccoonPete

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Jun 29, 2013
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My mistake, I forgot to mention that I will use the SSD for booting. So have you had any problems regarding Raid-0? Also is there a increased chance that the drive will fail when using it?
 
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juanrdp

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If you purchase a second SSD and put both in Raid-0 you will get a speed boost, but not too noticiable (SSD are already fast) and could have a problem in the long term if your controller dont pass the S.Op. trim instructions to the SSD (an SSD that didnt receive trim instructions will degrade performance over time)

If you purchase a second HDD and put both of them in Raid-0 will get a very notable increase in speed (both read and write).

For your second question you haven't an increase chance of drive fail using Raid-0 but as you are using two (or more if you use more than 2 disk in the raid) disk to hold a single set of data and each disk could fail and cause the loose of all the data you are doubling the chance of data loss. Your drive fail chance is the same, but the chance of loosing the data are increased by the number of drives.
 
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