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Pros/Cons - RAID 1 for OS

D

Drithius

n00b
Joined
Jan 15, 2007
Messages
17
Hi guys,

I'm posting for a friend who's itching to assemble his new PC. He told me earlier this evening that he was getting ready to set up a RAID 1 for his OS installation, at which point I told him, "RAID for you OS? ew!" Well, paraphrasing anyway.

I know that a RAID 1 will have slightly slower write speeds and this is why I cringed at his plans. But, can anyone elaborate on this any further? Does this impact the OS in a big way? Or is it offset by the faster read speeds? He's already bought two identical drives (WD 250gb w/ 16mb cache) so it's likely a bummer for him not to follow through on his RAID plans... and I doubt he'd want to purchase another drive for RAID 5.
 
Yes, he'll have slower writes. Yes, he'll have faster reads. Is it going to be noticable? No idea... that's not the point of raid 1 anyway. The point of raid 1 is redundancy, in case one of the drives physically fails. If thats not a concern, then he'll see pretty much no benefit to going with raid instead of a single fast drive.
 
An article was linked to by [H] a while ago regarding RAID arrays and the opinion of one of the boutique dealers (back before {h} Consumer disappeared).
The CEO said neither RAID 1 or 0 is really worth it. He said that while they offer both, RAID0 causes more problems than the performance upgrades were worth, and because of the ridiculously low rate of HD failure by major companies, RAID1 was redundant and expensive, and in his opinion, ultimately pointless.
My experiences with both are very similar. I would say he'd be better off going without RAID and just doing regular data backups. Cheaper too...
 
Why waste a drive just to mirror your OS?
back it up as an image or something.
 
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