Raid 0

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DaxInside

Silver Level Poster
At the moment I have a 1.5Tb drive in my PC. Ive also got a spare 1.5TB drive laying about not being used but they arn't the same brand. Can I use these in a RAID0 config or do the drives have to be matching exactly?

I think they are both the same speed just not sure about the memory cache etc.
 
Fear

Fear

Prolific Poster
I think for raid 0 you need 2 of the same HDD's that includes the same brand and model and can i ask why you would even want to raid 0 on 2 big drives as it really makes no sense unless using on smaller fast drives but even then the performance gain is not really all that much.
 
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DaxInside

Silver Level Poster
Well Ive recently changed some drives in my NAS and Ive got this extra drive spare now so thought I may as well put it to use.

From reading online is sounds like raid0 nearly doubles the HD speed, So why not do it? Are there any down sides to it? All my important data is stored on my NAS so no need to worry about data security.

Both HDs r 7200rpm but I dont know about their cache memory.
 
Fear

Fear

Prolific Poster
I had 2 150GB raptors in raid 0 on my last system and i can tell you that there is no big difference with them raided or not yes there is a slight boost but i don't think it will be very good on large HDD's anyway and i don't think you will be able to mix drives as far as i am aware as i posted above i think they have to be the same make and model, even if they both are 7200rpm it does not mean that they read/write at the same speed which is what needs to happen.

Just to compare the different results i got from WEI (which is not really a very good guide anyway)

2X150GB Raptors Raid 0 = 6.2

1X150GB Raptor= 5.9

1X650GB Caviar Black = 5.9

the difference i noticed well very little.
 
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DaxInside

Silver Level Poster
I appreciate the comments. I probably won't bother then. Id like a SSD but I think im going to wait another 6 months or so to see if the prices come down some more.
 
mishra

mishra

Rising Star
You may look into a hybrid drive, like Seagate Momentus XT, it is a 7200rpm, 32MB cache drive with additional 4GB flash memory. It is not as quick as SSD obviously but you can get 500GB for a very decent price. I have it as a system drive and it feels snappier than my old normal drive. It's a bit of a mix between speed, capacity and price (check link ).

Going RAID 0 is really asking for problems as it will fail sooner or later. Practically it will double the chance of your system failure.
 
Gorman

Gorman

Author Level
Drives dont have to be the same for RAID 0, lets call it Striped shall we. Your volume just ends up being cut if one drive is larger than the other.

But yeah, RAID, avoid unless you are cool with re-installs.
 
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PokerFace

Banned
Gorman said:
But yeah, RAID, avoid unless you are cool with re-installs.
Click to expand...

What about RAID 1, where everything is mirrored, is that a bad idea also? I thought RAID 1 meant you wouldn't have to worry about backing up stuff as it would automatically be making an exact copy on both hard drives.
 
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onlynik

Enthusiast
RAID 1 isn't a backup. It's a mirror. Either one of the disks can fail and your system and data on the RAID array will be OK, you then replace the failed disk with a new one and teh data is mirrored back on to the new disk to rebuild the array. You should still keep offsite backups.

Of the 4 machine I have 3 have RAID arrays, as does the NAS. The only one that diesn't is my laptop, and I back that up everyday.
 
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PokerFace

Banned
onlynik said:
RAID 1 isn't a backup. It's a mirror. Either one of the disks can fail and your system and data on the RAID array will be OK, you then replace the failed disk with a new one and teh data is mirrored back on to the new disk to rebuild the array. You should still keep offsite backups.
Click to expand...

So that fact that one hard drive can fail and you don't lose your data (because it's also on the other drive) means you have a back up doesn't it? So what's the difference between a RAID back up (or mirror) to an external back up?...Apart from the fact that if someone steals your pc, you still have the external :)
 
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onlynik

Enthusiast
PokerFace said:
So that fact that one hard drive can fail and you don't lose your data (because it's also on the other drive) means you have a back up doesn't it? So what's the difference between a RAID back up (or mirror) to an external back up?...Apart from the fact that if someone steals your pc, you still have the external :)
Click to expand...

Nope, if you delete a file it is deleted from the array (which presents itself to Windows as a single disk) you can't recover it unless you have a backup. RAID is not a backup, it a prevention of data loss.

Hope this helps.
 
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PokerFace

Banned
onlynik said:
Nope, if you delete a file it is deleted from the array (which presents itself to Windows as a single disk) you can't recover it unless you have a backup. RAID is not a backup, it a prevention of data loss.

Hope this helps.
Click to expand...

Ah, ok. To be honest though when I delete something I'm happy for it to be gone forever, so having it deleted from the RAID at the same time would save me the work of deleting it again from an external back up.

Just something I was thinking about for the future.

Thanks for advice.
 
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onlynik

Enthusiast
I'd suggest an online offsite backup, I use Crashplan, with about 150GB uploaded. It means if anything happens to my home, the most important files are safe which I can get back relatively cheaply.
 
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