RAID questions for a RAID newbie

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Domingo

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Jul 30, 2004
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I'm in the process of planning my next system build and was tossing around the idea of running a RAID set-up for the first time. The plan was to use two 1TB 7200 RPM disks.
I'd likely be going with RAID-0 as I'd be primarily using this as a gaming/HTPC system.

In general, what are the risks of doing this vs. having a single large disk? I always keep seing notes on failure rates...but realisticially - does this mean one of the disks is totally shot or just that there was some potential data loss/corruption? I have no desire to go back to the days of formatting every year for the sake of keeping things running well.

What are some pros/cons of going with a RAID-0 setup in a gaming computer? Also, this will likely be on Windows 7, so keep that in mind if you have experience with the OS.
 
RAID0 on 1TB drives is a terrible idea. Losing 2TB of data to a single drive failure? No thanks.

Store your stuff on another RAID array, computer, or external hard drive. Feel free to RAID0 for your OS drive but I wouldn't use the same array for your storage as well. Consider picking up a small SSD for your OS drive.
 
RAID 0 has double the failure rate of data loss, probably even more so than a single disk because it's the array's data that is lost when a member disk of a RAID 0 array is failed, even if it times out.

Sure, you'll get better performance, but you put yourself at a much higher risk of data loss.

If you keep backups, why not. But you probably don't, so don't do it.

Better strategy: partition one 1TB drive to be shortstroked for performance, use the other 1TB drive for miscellaneous storage.
 
Sounds like I might just go with a single drive or single large drive + SSD to simplify everything. I just kept hearing for years that RAID-0 is faster (and not much more beyond that), but it sounds like there's a pretty serious trade-off. I do keep pretty good back-ups with an external (sloooow) drive, but I'm not messing with something like that on a regular basis.
 
Well, as they say, "don't keep all your eggs in one basket" when referring to large capacity drives like the 1.5TBs or 2.0TBs out in the market today.

So long as you have a backup plan for your important data, that's probably a wiser solution to go with. 2TB RAID0 is just too risky without much benefit.
 
I have two leftover 250GB HD's RAIDed and short-stroked to 80GB (for ~6 months now), and one 1TB WD green HD for my data (plus a few externals for back-ups.)

I actually do like my RAID system, and do think it's noticeably faster, and if I could go back, I would have done it long ago (the fear of data loss/crashes scares me too.)

That said, if I was building something now, I'd probably wait for the next set of price drops on SSD's and use one of those as my main.
 
I'd love to wait, but my wife's PC is on death's door and I figured I'd hold out for Windows 7 and the new Nvidia or ATI cards due out in the fall. She tends to get my "hand me down" PC, which in this case is a pretty nice Core 2 Duo. Unless SSD's drop a ton in the next couple of months, I'm probably going with the western digital black series HD.
 
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