I've heard about and read about RAID throughout the years and understand it theoretically as a way to help e.g. server PCs reduce the chance of data loss, but now I am buying a new PC which I want to be as fast as possible and have learned that having two drives can considerably increase the perceived performance of your machine.
In the question Recommendations for hard drive performance boost, the author says he is going to RAID-0 two 7200 RPM drives together. What does this mean in practical terms for me with Windows 7 installed, e.g. can I buy two drives, go into the device manager and "raid-0 them together"?
I am not a network administrator or a hardware guy, I'm just a developer who is going to have a computer store build me a super fast machine next week. I can read the wikipedia page on RAID but it is just way too many trees and not enough forest to help me build a faster PC:
RAID-0: "Striped set without parity" or
"Striping". Provides improved
performance and additional storage but
no redundancy or fault tolerance.
Because there is no redundancy, this
level is not actually a Redundant
Array of Inexpensive Disks, i.e. not
true RAID. However, because of the
similarities to RAID (especially the
need for a controller to distribute
data across multiple disks), simple
strip sets are normally referred to as
RAID 0. Any disk failure destroys the
array, which has greater consequences
with more disks in the array (at a
minimum, catastrophic data loss is
twice as severe compared to single
drives without RAID). A single disk
failure destroys the entire array
because when data is written to a RAID
0 drive, the data is broken into
fragments. The number of fragments is
dictated by the number of disks in the
array. The fragments are written to
their respective disks simultaneously
on the same sector. This allows
smaller sections of the entire chunk
of data to be read off the drive in
parallel, increasing bandwidth. RAID 0
does not implement error checking so
any error is unrecoverable. More disks
in the array means higher bandwidth,
but greater risk of data loss.
So in plain English, how can "RAID-0" help me build a faster Windows-7 PC that I am going to order next week?
Best Answer
A RAID-0 configuration utilizes 2 separate hard disks and writes "chunks" of data to each one to minimize actuator movement and read/write data faster (each arm does half the work in a sense). The caveat with this is that there is a lack of fault tolerance - if one drive dies, all of your data is gone. And since there is 2 drives handling your data, the chances of losing your data is basically doubled. You may want to look into RAID1+0, which give you speed benefits as well as fault tolerance. You can swap in another disk upon failure and have the other disks rebuild it.
The RAID-0 image from wikipedia domonstrates it well:
imagine the disks are showing a file called
A.txt. Now, imagine each section as a 4096-byte cluster for example. Each disk is holding roughly 16384 bytes of this text file, and if one disk dies, there is no way to recover the other half.If you are limiting yourself to 2 disks, I'd suggest only doing the RAID-0 configuration on the operating system. Any files important to you should be stored on separate media such as an external drive, or if it was a possibility, 1 more hard drive. If it meant the difference between having a fast machine without fault tolerance, or having a slower machine with my files safe, I'd choose a slower machine. For me at least, I'd rather be safe than sorry.