Raid 0 performance

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skyfujin

n00b
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Nov 7, 2010
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12
Hello,

I am new to the idea of setting up a raid setup. I have always known about it, but never actually looked into it until recently. I only recently bought a second Sata hard drive, so I thought I would look into setting up a Raid.

As I said I was new to the idea of Raid setups and I was assuming I could setup the Raid and keep the Partitions that I currently have setup on my 750GB Seagate drive. Apparently that is not possible. This was my original idea for my setup:

My 750gb drive is divided in half with Two partitions. Once that I use for windows, and one that I use as storage. I just got a 160GB SATA OEM drive from a friend, so I wanted to setup the 160GB with the 750GB drive but keep my divided partitions on my 750gb. So have the 160GB drive working with the 350GB partition on the 750GB Seagate drive. After reading about how Raid setups work I am led to believe this is not possible(any chance I am wrong?).

Anyways to my point, currently my 750GB Seagate drive is the lowest performing piece of equipment in my rig, it really is quite slow(I bought it as a refurb on ebay) and it only scores a 5.8 on windows 7 performance index(not sure how much that actually tells). My new idea is to get another lower capacity sata drive to couple in Raid0 with the 160GB sata drive and use the 750GB as a total storage drive.

How much performance increase would a Raid0 setup give me just using some cheap low capacity Sata drives. I mean they obviously are not high performance drives, but reading about how Raid0 works they should increase my performance a good deal using them for my windows boot up. Just two 160gb drives should suite my needs fine(320gb about the same space I use for my windows install atm anyways). Would it be worth it for me to invest in another low capacity drive to Raid with the 160GB OEM drive I have now?
 
I would say yes, I am not an expert but I've been running a RAID 0 for my main OS drive and applications on my PC for years now and the performance is quite good.

The downside with RAID 0 is, 0 redundancy. If one drive dies you lose everything on both drives so just keep that in mind. As long as you don't store your mission critical info on it, it's fine. You will really notice a difference in load times for games, especially games that have to load large maps.
 
RabidSmurf said:
I would say yes, I am not an expert but I've been running a RAID 0 for my main OS drive and applications on my PC for years now and the performance is quite good.

The downside with RAID 0 is, 0 redundancy. If one drive dies you lose everything on both drives so just keep that in mind. As long as you don't store your mission critical info on it, it's fine. You will really notice a difference in load times for games, especially games that have to load large maps.
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Yea, I read about that issue. Fortunately I never store anything I wish to keep on my OS drive. Everything that I want to keep for the long run goes on my storage drives. I just use the OS drive to install programs/games or keep things I only plan on keeping temporary so Raid0 seems like the perfect solution for me. Now lets hope I can get some money together to get a cheap 160-250gb SATA drive soon, or if I can find somebody who has one lying around that they are not using that would be nice.
 
you're hoping to "get some money together" for a 250gb hard drive? what is this, 2001?

you guys should note your age and experience and listen to people with more:

raid 0 is a stupid waste of time and always has been. if you want a faster OS buy an ssd. ANY ssd. end of thread.
 
Kind of ironic that you recommend to use SSDs, but curse RAID0. SSDs are like 10-disk RAID0 devices internally.

Nothing wrong with RAID0, but a RAID0ed HDD doesn't make an SSD. Likewise, some tasks SSDs are hardly better at, so HDDs would make much more sense.

RAID0ing your system disk to get more performance wouldn't work all that well sadly. Though the Intel write caching option would increase speeds noticeably, since your RAM will be used as writeback buffer. This option is i think only available for RAID arrays, and does come at corruption risk on crashes or power interruptions. So it doesn't matter all that much, you may not even notice it. You need a decent speed increase before things start being noticeable, and I/O isn't always a huge bottleneck like under windows 7.

I'd say RAID0 is fun to try for young people (teens) trying out this stuff. It's a learning experience too. But don't expect too much from it. HDDs still do 1MB/s of random I/O at best.
 
bAMtan2 said:
you're hoping to "get some money together" for a 250gb hard drive? what is this, 2001?

you guys should note your age and experience and listen to people with more:

raid 0 is a stupid waste of time and always has been. if you want a faster OS buy an ssd. ANY ssd. end of thread.
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Well I just got done spending 350$ on PC upgrades this month, so yea "Hoping" to get an extra 40 bucks to throw at another HD. But if Raid0 isn't going to make much difference performance wise maybe I'll just stick with what I have or just get a cheap 1TB drive for more space. Can't afford an SSD atm obviously.

Sorry that my experience doesn't surpass yours, but I was always content with my Hard Drive the way it was and never really looked into what Raid setups could offer.
 
why are you guys arguing with him. with some posts you just laugh and move on (especially mine).
 
sub.mesa said:
Kind of ironic that you recommend to use SSDs, but curse RAID0. SSDs are like 10-disk RAID0 devices internally.
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ironic to you maybe. like you, I know what ssds are. I also know the administrator of the raid 0 inside an ssd is more competent than anybody here, including you and I. I know the parts of the ssd stripe are built and tested specifically to work together. I know the system was developed and tested over thousands of man hours of expert work. I know it was manufactured, integrated and tested by experts in their fields. the irony is only superficial, but I noticed it too. ha ha ironic.
 
Well I am sorry I even posted this. Maybe I should have mentioned I was just looking for a quick cheap solution to get a bit of performance gain for a primary drive. If I had the money to buy a new SSD or Two I would have just done that and avoided asking this question to begin with. Like I said I already blew 350$ this month upgrading my CPU/Motherboard and a few other misc items.
 
People make this too hard. Go with the RAID 0 array. It's cheap and I've not had an array fail in 12 years. If you have one drive and it fails you still lose all of your data. If it's a concern, back it up. If you are running 1 drive or RAID 0 and care about any of the data then a regular backup shouldn't even be considered an option, consider it mandatory. Easy enough.
 
bAMtan2 said:
ironic to you maybe. like you, I know what ssds are. I also know the administrator of the raid 0 inside an ssd is more competent than anybody here, including you and I. I know the parts of the ssd stripe are built and tested specifically to work together. I know the system was developed and tested over thousands of man hours of expert work. I know it was manufactured, integrated and tested by experts in their fields. the irony is only superficial, but I noticed it too. ha ha ironic.
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You're just making yourself look worse.
 
been doing it for 7 years now. the only hiccup rignt now is one of my raptors mayy be failing and when runing a scan one took longer than the other. when i get some time ill unraid the raptors and see if the hiccup goes away

 
xxEIEIOxx said:
People make this too hard. Go with the RAID 0 array. It's cheap and I've not had an array fail in 12 years. If you have one drive and it fails you still lose all of your data. If it's a concern, back it up. If you are running 1 drive or RAID 0 and care about any of the data then a regular backup shouldn't even be considered an option, consider it mandatory. Easy enough.
Click to expand...

I wasn't really making hard, I just wanted opinions on performance gain from doing it this way. But either way for 40$ for a 250GB or so drive theres really nothing I can lose. Worst case scenario I get an extra 250GB of storage space.

Loss of data on the Raid array is not really a concern to me, since I will use it as my system drive and I never keep anything that I am afraid to lose on my system drive anyways. I always put everything I want to keep in the long run on a separate drive or at least a separate partition.

Thanks to all who posted constructive comments. I really don't know what the argument was that came into this thread, as I did not expect such a thing from a simple Raid0 question. I am not a teen just trying this stuff out, but I obviously don't have the professional experience a lot of you guys have. I simply never gave Raid configurations a try, I actually used my IDE 200GB Maxtor Maxblast drive for years up until the last 2 years or so and was perfectly happy with it for my needs. I just recently bought my 750GB Seagate Sata drive within the last 2 years and decided to go for a cheap but effective solution to a slight performance increase with a Raid0.
 
I am not a teen just trying this stuff out, but I obviously don't have the professional experience a lot of you guys have.
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I guess i phrased that somewhat unluckily. What i meant was that i can see nothing wrong with trying out RAID0 just to get to know it and if you like exploring that part. But never put your truly important data at risk.

I agree we're making this too hard; as long as your data is protected some way, you can experiment all you want!
 
you may even be better off trying to sell your 160gb drive for $20 or $40, and take that money plus the $40 for the new drive and buy a nice 640+GB high performance drive. i see ~140MB/s sequential read and 110MB/s sequential write speeds on my 1TB WD black drives, which is probably close to double what your 750 segate does. use a small 50-100gb primary partition for the OS only (you dont need a 300-something gig OS partition!), then put everything else on the second partition. then use the 750gb drive you have for mass storage or backup.

but if you really want to play with RAID0 as a boot drive, no time like the present i suppose. just dont have your heart set on it being simple or foolproof or easy. and it certainly wont be a night and day difference in speed, if you can even tell the difference without benchmarking i would be a little suprised.
 
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