xwinx

Well I rarely hear of raid 0 being recommended. People build $3000 rigs but still leave it out... is it really that risky about losing all your data?

I just mentioned this in my local network site's computing forum and everyone started to say that my drives will die and I'll lose all my p0rn0z (well no, but all my files).

so is it really that risky? I've had 3 seagate 7200.11 500GB in raid 0 on my ohter pc for 2 months now and nothing is wrong with them..

I understand that most HDDs have an average annual failure rate of somewhere around 0.3%, so would having 4 drives in raid 0 make that overall failure rate chance = 1.2%? but still, do a lot of people have their drives die on them? Of course I regularly backup my data and Im pretty sure once a month my little brother will download something stupid and I'll have to reformat.

mr.derp

Its not that its a 100% percent chance you'll screw up your data with raid 0 but it's a higher change than not running raid 0. I still say it's pretty rare.

dralb

The risk is that if one drive fails, the array fails. This essentially double the chance of failure over a single drive. (and I have had 1 out of about 30 drives fail on my, so....) However, if you do a back-up to another drive once in a while, you'll be fine. You should be backing up with or without RAID anyways. I like it and think the speed is worth the extra effort.

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MalVeauX

Heya,

It's no more risky than just having 2x HDD's in the computer, not even linked in any way. The misconception of RAID (at any level) being more `risky' of a drive fail has nothing to do with RAID--it has to do with the simple concept of "more drives in one place = more potential chance that one of them will fail" simply because there's more drives to have that chance perhaps surface. The only thing here is that if, for any reason, a RAID0 array was compromised (drive fail, etc) since the data is stripped arcoss more than one drive and it has zero redundancy, you would lose all data on the array. But, if you're using performance drives (RAID0 levels), there shouldn't be `important' data on it anyway. That should be on a storage device of some kind, not on your performance working drives. That's just common sense with any HDD setup.

Back to the original subject, I see most performance machines listing RAID levels of some kind being used. So not sure about the whole `looked over' aspect of RAID. I see it every where.

Very best,

X1L3D

I have never raid 0 but if I had two drives I would. What I do is just back all my important stuff on flash drives so if I have to reformat I just do it. I think I would do the same if I raid 0 4 drives but as long as you have 4 good drives your raiding I don't think you really need to worry about them failing.

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xwinx

Okay thanks guys- I format regularly and backup so that is no concern.

Would you guys recommend doing raid 0 for customer builds?


and someone once told me that it might be a bit tough to raid 0 SSDs, putting a lot of pressure on the raid controller on my mobo since a single SSDs speed is already so great. So would this mean that Raid 0'ing 4x INtel X-25M SSDs with onboard will probably not work so good? Just thought of it because This would probably give me 1000mb/s read lol (250x4)

RAND0M1ZER

you are absolutley right about the .3% x4 = 1.2% people think that RAID increases the chance of your hard drives breaking which is not true.

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zhevra

There really isn't a increase in risk, its just like having 1 big HDD. If i was you i'd just back your data up every week or so.

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Thumper

I guess it depends on how much data you are backing up. If you are backing up 1TB every week (you said you have 2 500GB drives) than I would argue that a RAID 5 would be smarter simply to save you the time of doing such a large backup regularly (and where do you store this backup?). Of course, you would have to buy another drive (RAID 5 requires 3 drives minimum), but it's not like 500GB drives are expensive anymore.

As to RAIDing SSDs, I wouldn't think strapping 4 of them to an onboard controller would cause problems, but it is unlikely (read extremely doubtful) you would see the speeds you are expecting while doing so. Getting a PCI RAID card would be best (and especially if running a RAID 5).

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wimcle

It has some advantages

I am using matrix raid, striping the first part, and 0+1 the second... I boot of the first part and have a nightly backup strategy to the redundant part. I also clone to an external 640G drive (thats why the partition is 640g)

Should a disk fail I should be able to recover to the last nightly backup.


By wimcle at 2009-01-20