RAID0 Question

[Hatman]

This wasnt mentioned in the sticky.

If you have 3x 150gb hard drives, and you use RAID0, does that mean youll have 1drive with 450gb space and even faster speeds. Or will you have 300gb with faster speeds or 450gb with normal raid speeds or just basicly a 2drive array with a 3rd doing nothing.

If ya get me

 

[Hawkeye22]

A RAID array will always show up as one drive - 450gb with more performance. You can partition the array to have it show up as more logical drives in the OS.

 

[Hatman]

Ty. So it mite actuly be cheaper to RAID0 3drives than buying 2 to put in raid0 because you can get ones with less capacity, interesting.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Just remember that in RAID 0 if one drive fails all data on the array is gone and not easily recovered. Make sure have have good backups.

 

[rodney_ws]

If you're worried about data loss, either consider RAID 5 or RAID 1+0 because the RAID 0 you're considering has no redundancy at all... in fact, you're tripling your chances of data loss.

RAID 5 would give you 300 GB of usable space over your 3 drives... RAID 1+0 would require a 4th drive and you'd still only have 300 GB of usable space.

 

[jitpublisher]

The more drives you add, the more theroretical overall throughput you have. Past 2 drives, the throughput goes up, but in reality it does not actually improve that much. To take advantage you would need to be moving like 1000gig files around, or as a server where 20 people are accessing at the same time is the only way you will see any advantage of grouping multiple drives (more than 2 anyway) under RAID 0. The more drives you add tends to add longer lantencies, so you see your seek times start declining. Working on a common desktop PC, you will notice that everything in fact seems slow and sluggish as compared to 1 fast drive with low seek times.

If you want to go RAID 0, and it's a desktop PC, pick 2 decent drives with good seek times. You can under some conditions see a performance boost, when loading big files, you also will notice Windows will load a little faster.

Other than that, just get 1 big fast drive and be satisfied that is the best you can probably do. Or, put your OS on 1 drive and all your programs on the other. That will actually net you better performance on most desktops than a RAID 0 setup. Or, 1 drive with the OS, and 2 drives in RAID 0 for everything else.

 

[kona]

Just consider that you will also have to deal with a higher CPU usage. Don't get me wrong, I love RAID0 and have it my desktop, my wife's as well as my parents desktop and will never go back to a single drive. I regularly create backup images (which came in handy when both of my drives decided to fail for no apparent reason...warrantied back to seagate tho) I would seriously consider doing some homework on what the CPU usage impact will be if you add another drive VS just running two (assuming you are using onboard RAID...with a controller card it won't make a big diff). I am sure there are many people who will say that it should be minimal with these really fast dual cores and all but do they actually KNOW? find out and always create backups...that way you won't really need the RAID 5 so long as you have a way of storing your backups of course.