Would it be safe to RAID?

[Elemenopee]

I'm on the verge of building a new system and had a question as to whether or not it would be safe to create a raid 0 array.

I have a WD1200JD that I purchased when the thing first came out...so that was a couple of years ago i'd say. With the prices so low on that drive now from what they used to be, the idea of setting up a raid with my current drive and a new one sounds promising.

However, i'm curious as to whether or not i'm taking a big risk in setting up a RAID with one much older drive and a brand new one. While i've yet to have any problems with the one i have now...it still worries me. So any help or input is much appreciated

 

[Xrave]

Well, some WD hard drives last longer than others. I have a couple that I've had for 4+ years that are still going without a problem.

But RAID-0 can be a little risky. The performance increase is nice, but if one drive dies, you lose the information contained on both.

If the drives are just for storage, I wouldn't set up an array, but if it's a gaming machine where you just have programs and stuff that's easy to replace if you do lose it, I'd set up the array for the extra performance.

 

[unhappy_mage]

go get a couple more and raid-5 em. other than that no. raid0 is awful for reliability, especially with WDs. I dunno about the newer ones but we had about 35 of their 27gb disks at my school a year ago and now we have like 27 due to hardware failure. does not say good things about wd disks. also have compatibility problems with being single versus master. yuck. get seagates. had 2 of the 120s, the st3120026a's for a year now and no problems. not as much data but still...

otoh, we've had 2 60's in raid-0 (yuck) for almost 2 years. no problems. i hope to be upgrading this sooooon though. raid0 is not safe. it's way worse reliability-wise than a single disk.

 

[Elemenopee]

yeah thats my main concern that if the old one goes down i lose data from both. The raid would be for storage mainly, since i'm planning on getting a 74GB Raptor for system files.

Its not so much that i'm looking to do it for the performance increase, it is just a lot easier to manage 1 big 240 gig array (and cheaper since i already have one drive)...and the performance boost doesn't hurt either

 

[Ice Czar]

dont RAID 0 storage
thats not what its for, and its perfromance overkill
youll see no real benefit in almost any ap you can name
and places the data at a higher risk
and thats not just HDD failure, but corruption, and mobo failure as well if its onboard
(if you elect not to buy your next board based on which RAID Chip it has)

if you want a single partition (which I wouldnt necessarilly agree with)
you can alway mount a seperate HDD as a folder inside another partition

Using NTFS mounted drives

If you're a member of the Administrators group, you can use Disk Management to connect, or mount, a local drive at any empty folder on a local NTFS volume. You can format a mounted drive with any file system supported by Windows 2000.

When you mount a local drive at an empty NTFS folder, Windows 2000 assigns a path to the drive rather than a drive letter. Mounted drives are not subject to the 26-drive limit imposed by drive letters, so you can use mounted drives to access more than 26 drives on your computer. Windows 2000 ensures that drive paths retain their association to the drive, so you can add or rearrange storage devices without the drive path failing.

For example, if you have a CD-ROM drive with the drive letter D, and an NTFS-formatted volume with the drive letter C, you could mount the CD-ROM drive at an empty folder C:\CD-ROM, and then access the CD-ROM drive directly through the path C:\CD-ROM. If desired, you can remove the drive letter D and continue to access the CD-ROM through the mounted drive path.

Mounted drives make data more accessible and give you the flexibility to manage data storage based on your work environment and system usage. For example, you can:

Make the C:\Users folder a mounted drive with NTFS disk quotas and fault tolerance enabled, so you can track or constrain disk usage and protect user data on the mounted drive, without doing the same on the C: drive.
Make the C:\Temp folder a mounted drive to provide additional disk space for temporary files.
Move program files to another, larger drive when space is low on the C: drive, and mount it as C:\Program Files.

 

[Xrave]

Ya, RAID-0 storage is what we call an oxymoron

If anything, when you get the second hard drive, you should do RAID-1 so you'll have a backup of your stored files. Otherwise I'd just use 2 drives separetly and store stuff on both of them independently.

 

[Elemenopee]

ok well thanks a bunch for the words of caution. I guess i'll just go ahead and rough it out with having 3 seperate drives.

 

[M0rph3us]

Get another and RAID5. Or if you find the right 2-channel controller, you can use JBOD. Then hardware failures would only lose some data, not all. Unless it was lightning. Lightning would kill it.

 

[animeguru]

Get another and RAID5. Or if you find the right 2-channel controller, you can use JBOD. Then hardware failures would only lose some data, not all. Unless it was lightning. Lightning would kill it.

On a desktop, it'd be filling the CPU cycles with all the calculations and such and kill any performace increase you think you'd see. Unless of course you buy a good RAID controller card with a dedicated XOR processor on it to do all the parity calculations, which probably costs more than most people are willing to spend. Your average Highpoint controller and such aren't really hardware RAID, the CPU does all the calculations for it.

In general, RAID 5 in a desktop (especially Windows) will be a performance deterant. Ideally, you'd use it in a file server situation where the CPU cylcles used won't affect the speed of the desktop users.