To raid or not to raid

With raid you also have to worry about the raid card, or even worse the onboard raid controller failing. This happened to me in the past and is the reason I never raid anymore. Using windows software to raid is kind of like wiping before you poop it doesn't really make any sense. A proper controller is always faster, but also just another piece in the puzzle to go bad on you. My general thought on the subject is anyone saying otherwise doesn't have 20 years behind various computers to have the personal experience to realize this. The articles on the subject are meaningless to me when I have countless personal experience to counter them.

It's sadly the same thing as sli/crossfire, the performance increase is barely noticeable in some instances, and you generally can't expect more than about a 25% increase even in good circumstances.
I say this having used both of them. Feel free to argue.

Come on…if we were all worried about a piece of hardware failing then we would be back to pen and paper! And even that could fail!!!

I have to ask. How many of you owned one of those old IBM Deskstar drives? Sorry I can’t remember the model number but they were super-fast for their time. They were also prone to overheating and seizing. In fact they were so bad they earned themselves the nickname Deathstar! I owned one, and I can honestly say that there were numerous occasions where I yank it out of my pc to stick it in the freezer just to revive it! I bet that most of the ‘Deathstar’ owners knew of its failure rate but purchased the drive anyways only because if its performance! Sure a drive can fail in a RAID setup…it can also fail in a non RAID set up. As with a controller card or onboard chip. Be it RAID or not. Hence why we perform backups. And even they can fail!

Maguscreed,

With your 20 years of various computing experience you must know about the old Pentium bug from back in the 90’s. Or the flaws of the PIII when Intel was playing catch up with AMD. But yet that did not discourage you from purchasing another Intel CPU (according to your system specs)

Pparks1,

Have you ever experienced 2 or more SSD’s in RAID? Would you not be curious to see if it would improve on your video editing? And if it does would you buy into it or would you stick with your opinion? And remember, we are talking about SSD’s not HDD!

I actually own intel and amd, I also have both ATI and Nvidia at this very moment no system is flawless. My other system is a old fx60 rig. This one will soon be replaced by another Intel system more than likely. I don't really have any brand loyalty, you buy enough stuff and eventually you'll get something bad from all of them. I do generally get XFX for graphics cards because they've been good on return policy.

Performance means a bit to me, I'm a die hard gamer have been since I was about 8 years old. I'm not going to abandon all reason in order to get it though. I barely overclock and when I do I keep it in the 15-20% area at the absolute most. I don't even mess with liquid cooling personally. Even though I've built several systems for others that used it.

In the end I suppose some of it's experience and some of it is maturity. 10 years ago I probably wouldn't have kept a hard drive with important data on it locked in a fire proof safe; today I do.

...and now that I think about it, brand really has very little to do with this discussion outside of you trying to support a point of view that has no real basis in logic.

...but screw logic, if you want the biggest baddest thing around at the moment more power to you. Just don't expect me not to warn you against the possible downsides of making that purchase.

I just gave an example of you buying into something despite its past record. However your failure with RAID does not mean that mine or anyone else’s will fail as well. Just pointed out that that there are flaws and failures with all forms of computer technology and not just some old RAID setup!

The OP asked what others have for a set up based on 2 or more SSD. I thought it would be good to share mine for that’s exactly how my computer is configured. But I can see now that RAID seems to be a touchy subject. And according to you, those who do have a RAID set up are merely inexperienced.

Im sorry for you failure, hopefully you did not lose any important data. But if you have not experienced RAID on 2 or more SSD’s then your opinion is just biased based on old technology.

There is no evidence to suggest SSD's are any more reliable than standard hdd's, and failure is always a option with hardware. Which was my basic point.

Yes, a RAID array is at least 2 disks.

However only RAID0, which seems to be the debate here, is non-redundant…despite being called RAID (Redundant Array of independent Disks). It will give you the best performance but as others have pointed out, you lose 1 drive in the array you will lose all of your data on that array. You can still backup or even image a RAID 0 to a separate disk.

The other RAID Array’s, 1 through 10, will give you redundancy and some performance benefits depending on which type of RAID you choose. Linus from NCIX tech Tips best explains the differences here.

YouTube - RAID 0 & RAID 1 Setup Guide (NCIX Tech Tips #77)
YouTube - RAID 5 & RAID 10 Tutorial & Explanation (NCIX Tech Tips #79)

If you are pondering the thought of getting a second SSD, I say try a RAID 0 set up and be you own judge. Just make sure you perform routine backups of your data. I use both Acronis and SyncBack and have absolute no worry about losing data due to a failed disk in my array.