Is RAID worth it?

[jollijurt92]

I've been looking up everything on RAID and the only one that looks promising is RAID 0, i mean if my drive is going to fail its going to fail and i might as well get more i/o out of it(**but ive also read that putting drives in RAID makes them more prone to failure is that true?**)...now the only thing that worries me is when i read "Software RAID is not usable across operating systems" http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/which-one-is-better-software-raid-or-hardware-raid/ and thats exactly what i wanted to do with Asus' "express gate" (if you dont know what express gate is, its a tiny linux based operating system on the board so u can get on the internet, listen to music etc without having to boot into windows...oh yeah and it only takes 5 seconds...XD..which i thought would be a great feature) so.. the whole idea of setting up RAID was to put my OS and music on it but now if this is true (** is it???**) my hopes are dashed...

hey and any recommendations on hdds for RAID0 would be appreciated i was looking for 500gb x 2 and found... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136358 it doesnt say its rpm but in the model number it says 5000 which i was guessing was it (yes?) but it also has double the cache of this other drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136073 **so...whats more important.. cache size or rpm?? ** thanks in advance!!

 

[sminlal]

RAID0 does NOT improve access times, and therefore it won't really help very much with boot speeds and starting programs. It CAN improve transfer rates, depending on the file sizes - and so it can help speed up programs that need to read or write very large files quickly (video editing, for example).

RAID0 doesn't make A disk failure more likely, but because you are relying on multiple drives you have a net increased failure risk. Two drives means twice the chance of a failure compared to a single drive, and with RAID0 if you loose EITHER disk you've lost ALL your data.

 

[jollijurt92]

yeah. haha wikipedia ftw. i was snooping around online and i guess cache doesnt really matter unless youre predictable. so faster rpm is better..?

 

[sminlal]

Drives with higher RPM almost always have faster access times than their slower counterparts. So yeah, RPM will have a bigger impact on performance than cache size. This is basically because all hard drive manufacturers include enough cache on their drives - adding any more wouldn't really make a noticeable improvement.

 

[jollijurt92]

so for what should i use raid 0 for? music movies etc? or..programs. but not the os...or any programs i have to purchase. and what do u mean by "depending on the file sizes" so big files or small ones like .mp3 ?

 

[sminlal]

RAID 0 is probably only going to give you significant benefits when reading or writing large files. So if you want to copy movies, for example, you'd be able to do it faster with a RAID 0 set (assuming that the OTHER drive you're copying to or from is just as fast).

But RAID0 wouldn't make any difference when simply PLAYING a movie, since the data rate required for movie (or music) playback is pretty low.