Best drive for Raid 0

[jsl10]

I want to try out my Asus P5Q Deluxe's Drive Xpert built-in raid using the two dedicated sata ports (it is driverless so I assume it is supported by hardware rather than a software raid). Anyway, I wanted to pick up a couple drives of 500GB or more (cheap as possible though since this is just for fun). I'm trying to decide if the Western Digital 640GB (two platter) drive would be a good choice. It's not too pricy but I read one review that showed the WD drive did really bad in RAID (slower than a single drive)! Does anyone know if this is true or is there some different settings for the WD drives that make them good for RAID? How about the Samsung's with the high density platters? Any other fast drives that would benifit from being in a RAID 0? I'm picking up a Seagate 1.5TB drive for bulk storage and a Velociraptor for my OS drive (and use a NAS for backup) but want to have an extra FAST partition for those applications where it might help (video encoding, etc.).

 

[Syntax Error]

Onboard motherboard RAID tends to go by the name "FakeRAID", which means it's not actually hardware RAID, but rather, hardware-assisted software RAID, which means it still utilizes CPU power as overhead, especially if you're going to do complicated RAID functions such as RAID 5; RAID 0 shouldn't have too much CPU overhead because of its relatively simple utilization. You'll still probably need drivers for the RAID controller on your installation (especially if you're disk imaging it over to the RAID array) if the RAID array is intended to be bootable.

I'm personally running two WD6400AAKS on my onboard Gigabyte RAID controller and the performance is pretty good, but I did it mainly for fun and for one large logical drive. Transfer rates are above that of a single WD6400AAKS for sure, but it's not double as some may lead you to believe.

Remember, with RAID 0, you get zero redundancy, and the chances for data loss increases exponentially as you add another drive into the fray as data in RAID 0 will be lost if just one of the drives in the array were to fail.

You're probably better off just sticking with one drive for your OS and other drives for storage, to not mess around with your onboard RAID controller and increase your risk for data loss.

 

[jsl10]

Yup, I understand "fake" raid. The P5Q Deluxe uses a Silicon Image Sil5723 to support two special sata ports for raid and Asus says that it requires no drivers or bios settings. So I assume that the SI chip must do the basic calculations to support raid 0 (i.e. not just a software "fake" raid). But as I said, this is just for fun. As I explained, I am not using this for the OS drive or for bulk storage. I just want an extra fast partition for doing specific things where a fast partion would help (even if it is just for temporary work area). It's nice to know that the WD6400AAKS is faster than a single drive. I wonder what the problem was with that one review (wish I could find it again now!).

 

[mystykmax]

Right now I have two 640GB WD drives in RAID 0 on my Gigabyte P35-DS4 with Intel's ICH9R and I can assure you, it's much faster than a single drive. I installed a large piece of software from my data drive to my 2x640 system and it's simply blazing fast. I don't know how to explain the speed, but it's ridiculous. As for the worry about data loss, you could always just image your raid drive to your big data drive and if the OS goes south, just re-image it. I've had very successful systems and I've been using RAID 0 on 2 drives for my OS for about 4 1/2 years now.