Worth setting up a RAID 0??

[Rob Riot UK]

Hey guys. Well I've read a lot of horror stories about RAID 0 so was wondering whether it would really be worth setting up on my new build.

I'm in the process of building a quad-core computer with 8 GB RAM and a X4 955 processor. I will be using two identical 500GB drives in the set-up. I do a lot of video editing, not a great deal of HD video editing however (which I heard was the main reason for needing a RAID 0), aside from that I only use the computer for viewing video, surfing the internet and also photo and sound editing.

Now I understand the speed benefits but are the chances of the array failing really that high? My data is very important so any advice would be greatly appreciated. I also heard you will loose a chunk of space to make up the RAID array? Is this true and how much will I loose?

 

[sminlal]

The reality is that you need to make backups of your data to external disk drives whether you have RAID or not. Even RAID 1, which protects against a drive failure, doesn't protect you against a multitude of other risks to your data. So more important than worrying about the reliability of RAID 0 is to consider how best to back up your data.

If you think about it that way, then you put the risks of RAID 0 into their proper perspective, which is: can you tolerate the increased risk of downtime to repair the disks, restore your data from backup, and redo the work you did since the last backup.

Remember, a sound backup strategy is to make two copies of your data to media that's stored OFFLINE, one copy of which is kept OFFSITE.


As for disk space on RAID - you don't loose any disk space with RAID 0 - if you have two 500GB drives then you get a total of 1TB ( 2 x 500GB ) to work with. With RAID 1 (mirrored data on two drives) you only get to use 500GB with the same disks.

 

[Rob Riot UK]

Thanks for that. What you said makes a lot of sense. In the past I have been very lax with backing up data. With that in mind I will probably get another drive to use for back-up.

Once I've set up RAID 0 is it possible to partition part of it for the O/S or is it pointless doing so? Just curious as this will be first time setting up a RAID ).

 

[sminlal]

Once you've created a RAID volume it looks like an ordinary disk to the operating system and you can partition it or not depending on your preferences. My own preference would be to not partition it, but it's entirely up to you.