I'm building a new computer over the summer. I'm fairly competent in computer hardware, and am thus building the computer from scratch. I have everything planned out, but I was wondering about RAID. I asked which RAID I should use earlier, but now that it's pretty clear that RAID 1 isn't really that great, I think I'll go with cloud-backup instead of disk-redundancy. However, I still face a choice: use two 1 TB drives as two 1 TB drives, or combine them into a RAID 0 striped array. Is there any performance gain at all? I know that if one drive dies, everything is gone, so is the performance gain worth it? I'm building a pretty advanced computer, with SLI video cards and a fast CPU, so I'm thinking RAID 0 would give me some good hard drive performance. From your experience, is RAID 0 viable?
Answer
Hardware-RAID-0 is always faster than a single drive because you can step the reads and writes across the two drives simultaneously. Downside is that if either drive fails, you lose data on both disks. So if your backups are good, and you are willing to take the risk of a slightly higher risk of data loss, go for it.
Software-RAID-0 can provide improvements, but in my opinion not enough to justify the increased risk of data loss. Also, you almost can almost never boot from a software-RAID-0 partition.
Wasn't there an article recently that had an obscene number of TB drives in a stripe to see how the performance compared?
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