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Is there really any reason for me to run Raid 0?
EliteLamer
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I have been running it for years but an IT guy told me that Raid 0 was not worth it and the fact that I lose the instant recovery feature on my mobo when I run raid. I am about to reinstall and was thinking should I go raid again or not?
SEGA
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I don't see anything wrong with using it, as long as you understand what you're getting into.
I mean, hey, if it's worth it to you, that's fine. I prefer RAID 1, myself. (RAID 5 is also really awesome if you have a controller that supports it).
Really, I can't imagine a situation where data reliability is that much less important than a mostly minimal speed boost. The fact remains that very few applications require sustained read/writes. The only really reasonable solutions I've seen is running two small drives in RAID 0 for your OS and performance-critical programs, and a bigger and cheaper drive for essential data.
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So if the chance of failure is just "if one of the two drives fails all your data is lost" without other risks I don't see it being a major issue. Then again, maybe I've just gotten lucky...
My dad has had 3 drives, of 3 different brands, die on him over the past 8 years.
I see about 1 dead hard drive a year at work, where we have about 150 computers.
so yea, you're really lucky.
The odds of a single drive dying do not increase in RAID 0. But the problem is is that if one drive dies, you lose 2 drives worth of data. So in that light the risk is higher. either drive dies, they take the whole thing with it.
You've definitely gotten lucky. I've had one die on me, my dad has lost three (through no fault of his own), and my brother just lost one last month (although that one was at least partially his fault). Also, during my two years in the tech support department in my company, there were at least three catastrophic hard drive failures on customer servers. Also, that statistic does not count the time when a customer decided to check the serial numbers on the drives in a raid array by pulling the array out while the system was running, which completely trashed four(?) disks.
Yeah, I understand that, I'm just skeptical due to personal experience about the likelihood of even one out of two drives failing. I know it happens, I've just never experienced it so I find it hard to believe that the chances are particularly high (and one HDD out of 150 each year would be a pretty low chance of failure if that was statistically representative, wouldn't it?).
I suppose the risk increases the more drives you add to the array, though.
Here's the thing about hard drives failing - you think it won't happen to you until it does. I was the same way (although I did keep backups, so I was ready for it): I'm a power user, I keep my system cool, don't do stuff that makes my disks thrash all the time, etc. These people who lose hard drives all the time must keep them in a toaster oven and use them as bowling pins, right? We've all learned to never underestimate the stupidity of Internet citizens when it comes to things like product reviews or anecdotes about losing 5 great name-brand drives in a year. Much of that is true - like the story about the guy who kept returning motherboards because they were dead until the service desk guy pulled out one of his returns and found it covered in grease. "Yeah," he said, "I spray them with WD40; it protects them."
But here's the thing: you can cradle your hard drives like newborns and keep them pointing due north - it doesn't matter. At some point, you will have a drive that is working one day and will die the next time you boot up your system (or it will start to fail, at which point you should consider it to be dead and replace it immediately). No amount of sensitivity to the force will tell you that the failure is coming. Drives are precise electromechanical devices (hell, the drive head floats on a sheet of air microns thick that is generated by the platters spinning) that wear, and wear out, naturally over time.
I'm pretty lucky too - I've had lots of drives for years without any issues, and they have seen multiple formats, OS reinstalls, etc., and even a minor amount of abuse (switching in and out, moving around, etc). One day, one of them just up and died when I booted up my system, and it was one of the newer ones.
RAID 0 offers a noticeable boost in throughput since you're striping the data across multiple drives. The read and write times of the hard drive remains the same, but you're utilizing more drives so there is a gain. You'll notice it when you're starting up a game or at a loading screen.
A drive dies and you lose all your data? OH NOES. Guess what happens when your one normal drive dies? You lose all your data...
RAID is high availability, not a backup. Always backup your important data to a place not your main drives. RAID can never replace proper backups. The advantage of RAID 1 is protection from a single drive failure and some speed increases, but at the cost of half your hard drive space (more $$$). RAID 1 means you'd have to lose two drives to go down or lose data yes, but guess what happens when you save over that file you didn't mean to? Oops, gone.
If this machine you're redoing is mainly a gaming machine I'd recommend RAID 0, that's what I do because the performance is very important to me and I don't really care about having RAID 1 to protect me from a crash. My documents are backed up to external storage.
So yea, There is better performance in load times. However, the difference is generally so miniscule that you won't notice it.