Do I need to format to RAID-0

Dwarf said:

Whichever type of array you use, you need to ensure that you have a suitable driver available if the Windows 7 disk doesn't have a suitable driver included. Vista did a good job of including these drivers, and Windows 7 did even better, but there will probably be hardware that isn't recognized without a 3rd party driver. Once that has been loaded, the array will appear as a single disk drive. All commands will be sent, as though to a single drive. The hardware (RAID controller) intercepts these commands and then passes them to the individual drives in the appropriate manner.

agreed on that one. I was lucky with my build in that I didn't need to install any 3rd party RAID drivers, but I had an HP envy (laptop) with SSDs in RAID 0 that was far from easy to get working. As long as you don't have a DELL or HP (or some obscure RAID controller) it should work pretty smoothly

[QUOTE=ChiefRA;904418]

soulstealer1984 said:

DeaconFrost said:

Agreed i used a raid0 with my first build and it ended very badly

Guys, guys, I have the same question to you as in other posts: What about RAID 01? You get a) the fastest possible performance AND b) protection for your data.

ChiefRA

P.S.: You have to spend more money on the HDD's as you need at least 4 of them, but it's more reliable to buy lety's say 4 x 640Gb SATA III HDD's than to buy 1 x SSD of 64 Gb. A Lot more space for the RAID0 configuration ( ~ 1,2 Tb) instead of keeping a 64 Gb of fast SSD to keep your OS and normal Apps on it.

RAID 1 Mirroring may not be what you think it is as far as "protecting your data" goes. If windows mangles a file it gets mangled on both drives simultaneously. Also if you delete something by accident it gets deleted on both drives at the same time. If the OS gets tanked you can't just unplug one drive and expect to boot from the other like nothing happened. All it does for you is allow the PC to keep running if one of the drives in the set fails mechanically. Backing up your DATA is not the purpose of RAID 1. Sorry if I sound like I'm ranting on about this but I see a lot of miconseptions about RAID, what it does, and what its for. Unfortunatly a lot of the time it's in the form of a "how do I get my DATA back, I thought I was protected" thread.

So from what I gather, RAID 0 with software is not very good because you do not see much performance gain and there is an increased chance of loosing data. I am wondering if there is any other problems specificly with Windows 7. So for example, will Wndows 7 have a difficult time recognizing my drives in RAID, or will it incorrectly write data.

I'm thinking that RAID 0 might not be so great in terms of preformance gain after reading a bunch of forms. But since I have some time now to experiment, I'm thinking I'll try RAID 0 for a bit before switching back.

Deaconfrost: Did you use to WoW with XYZA on AAA?

Windows 7 doesn't have any problems (that I know of) with RAID. Windows + your sata controller might cause problems but thats rare.

In the image below think of A as a file, each part of the file is numbed A1-A8. RAID0 splits the data to increase the read/write speed but if any part of that file is lost the whole file is lost (i know you can recover parts of the file but that is very expensive/time consuming).


Image from wikipedia.

As other posters have said RAID0 on a desktop is not as helpful as one would think. unless your accessing large files for video editing or something like that. If your wanting to just combine the two drives into a single larger storage space windows allows spanned drives aka JBOD. Which doesn't increase speed but does allow data to be recovered if a drive files.

alphanumeric said:

If windows mangles a file it gets mangled on both drives simultaneously. Also if you delete something by accident it gets deleted on both drives at the same time.

Absolutely! I only ever use RAID1, aka mirroring, if it is for a server that just runs an application or so, where no actual data is stored on the server at all. RAID1 is not a backup method! Glad to see it being posted.

ChiefRA said:

Guys, guys, I have the same question to you as in other posts: What about RAID 01? You get a) the fastest possible performance AND b) protection for your data.

Well no...that's the problem. You really aren't getting that "fastest" possible performance. That's the myth. RAID, all types, is pretty much pointless in a desktop computing environment. You also don't get protection from your data, as described in other posts.

If you really care about performance, get an SSD, a large storage drive, and then a way of backing up your data offline, like an external drive.

You won't get any benefits from software based raid 0, but if it's supported at the hardware level, with two good HDDs in raid 0 you will get definitely get much faster write speeds than with an SSD and probably faster reads too, a lot more storage for the money, plus mechanical hdds don't wear out as fast as an SSD.

madtownidiot said:

You won't get any benefits from software based raid 0, but if it's supported at the hardware level, with two good HDDs in raid 0 you will get definitely get much faster write speeds than with an SSD and probably faster reads too, a lot more storage for the money, plus mechanical hdds don't wear out as fast as an SSD.

You make some valid points, such as the fact mechanical drives wear out faster, but from what I've seen, the SSDs will provide much better performance than a mechanical RAID0 array. You also have to include the fact that a RAID0 array halves the reliability of the drives, because if one fails, you lost the data on both, meaning your probability of failure doubles.

The other point you aren't including is that most benchmarks of RAID0 involve synthetic tests, and not real world tests. Real world speeds and overall performance are FAR lower than what most people thing and expect with RAID0. For example, your seek time often increases with an array. That translates into slower performance for many of Windows' basic operations.

I'm not sure why some people are still clinging to a long-debunked myth, but if you are dealing with mechanical drives in a desktop environment, there's no reason to consider RAID anymore. That myth was shot down time and time again, and once Anandtech released their official tests, it was laid to rest.