[nmX.Memnoch]

ripken204, on Aug 25 2007, 09:56 PM, said:

well the more hard drives in RAID0 the faster is it, but the more risk there is to losing all of your data..

To an extent. Once it gets to a certain number of drives the speed increases stop and the only benefit is having the one large array vs. a bunch of individual drives. If you're going to put more than 2 drives in a RAID0 array, that's when I recommend just moving to RAID10.

[ripken204]

nmX.Memnoch, on Aug 26 2007, 01:16 AM, said:

ripken204, on Aug 25 2007, 09:56 PM, said:

well the more hard drives in RAID0 the faster is it, but the more risk there is to losing all of your data..

To an extent. Once it gets to a certain number of drives the speed increases stop and the only benefit is having the one large array vs. a bunch of individual drives. If you're going to put more than 2 drives in a RAID0 array, that's when I recommend just moving to RAID10.

well that prolly has to do with the conroller also. buy ya, raid 10 is a good idea, if not, raid 5.

[Zxian]

ripken204, on Aug 25 2007, 10:43 PM, said:

well that prolly has to do with the conroller also. buy ya, raid 10 is a good idea, if not, raid 5.

Well sure - it all has to do with the RAID controller. The question that comes up is when does the overhead of the controller outweigh the performance increase from the added drive.

@iceangel89 - Those two drives that I showed you might cost a bit more than a single raptor, but the overlal performance is MUCH higher. You'll never see a single Raptor get 300MB/s burst and 120MB/s sustained transfers.

RAID0 should never be where you store critical data. For me - all of my "save data" goes on my file server (which has nothing but redundant storage), while the system drive goes on the RAID array. If one of the drives dies, I've always got a system backup done every other day, so restoring the system is easy. One other thing - people shouldn't confuse RAID0 with "true" RAID. Remember, the R stands for "redundant", which RAID0 has none of.

If you're wondering about the best performance for the least cost - two 250GB or 320GB drives in RAID0 will outdo a single Raptor any day.

[nmX.Memnoch]

ripken204, on Aug 26 2007, 12:43 AM, said:

buy ya, raid 10 is a good idea, if not, raid 5.

It all depends on the application. If you're looking for speed you definitely don't want to go RAID5 unless you have a really good RAID controller. And even then you should weigh your storage size and speed requirements to decide which RAID level to use. IMO, RAID5 should never be used for an OS drive.

None of the integrated solutions (Intel, NVIDIA, ATI, etc, etc) are considered really good RAID controllers. Using them for RAID0, RAID1 or RAID10 is fine because no calculations have to be performed to write or read the data. Anything higher than those levels though, and you need a real hardware RAID controller with it's own dedicated processor, cache, and optionally a battery backup for the cache.

See this thread for more detailed information.