RAID 0

[abhay6547]

Okay guys so I wanted a way to combine the volumes of my two hard drives (not SSDs) into one for convenience. My questions are:

 

1. Can I use RAID 0 with two different volumes on two different model drives

2. To those who have used RAID 0, is it relatively reliable? Have you experienced any major issues?

3. Is it worth it in the end, in your opinion.

[Chriz6097]

Okay guys so I wanted a way to combine the volumes of my two hard drives (not SSDs) into one for convenience. My questions are:

 

1. Can I use RAID 0 with two different volumes on two different model drives

2. To those who have used RAID 0, is it relatively reliable? Have you experienced any major issues?

3. Is it worth it in the end, in your opinion.

Can't answer the first but a friend of mine did a raid 0 using 1 TB hard drives. It ended horribly, one drive failed within a month but he also brought it around a lot and they weren't new drives. Raid 0 is really not worth it for hard drives because the speed difference isnt worth loosing that much data while ssd's are still small and the amount of data lost is usually less. What I can say if you do it, DO NIGHTLY BACKUPS to a reliable drive(s).

[alpenwasser]

Okay guys so I wanted a way to combine the volumes of my two hard drives (not SSDs) into one for convenience. My questions are:

 

1. Can I use RAID 0 with two different volumes on two different model drives

2. To those who have used RAID 0, is it relatively reliable? Have you experienced any major issues?

3. Is it worth it in the end, in your opinion.

Are you intending to put data on this RAID0? Because if so, I would very much

advise against that. RAID0 is acceptable for an OS partition, but I would never

use it to store data (unless, of course, I had an up-to-date and reliable backup).

1. You mean take your existing Volumes and fuse them into one volume without

moving your data off of them? I do not believe that that would work, you'd

need to back up your data, create the RAID0 and then move your data onto the

RAID.

As for different drives and partitions etc.: The partitions would need to be

the same size, and the speed would be bottlenecked by the slower drives, but

it would be possible. EDIT: It would work with different size partitions

AFAIK, but you'd be limited by the smaller one. So 'need' is a relative term

in this scenario, of course./EDIT

2. RAID0 is inherently unreliable IMHO. If you have anything important on it,

back it up. Properly.

3. Considering the possible pitfalls I would advise against it.

Having said that, I recall that there used to be a feature in Windows which

would allow you to create a multi-disk volume, but it wasn't really proper

RAID0 because I think you could throw a pretty arbitrary mix of disk sizes

and models at it and it. However, the same points about reliability and moving

your data off your disks before creating the volume still apply (I once accidentally

deleted 300 GB of movies like that ). I have no idea if that feature

still exists though (haven't used Windows in a few years). But if it does,

and if you use it: Have a backup of the data that's on it is important to you.

[IdeaStormer]

Okay guys so I wanted a way to combine the volumes of my two hard drives (not SSDs) into one for convenience. My questions are:

 

1. Can I use RAID 0 with two different volumes on two different model drives

2. To those who have used RAID 0, is it relatively reliable? Have you experienced any major issues?

3. Is it worth it in the end, in your opinion.

 

1. Yes you can. Although many will pipe in with screams of "don't do it!" with no actual facts on the matter, RAID 0 is RAID 0 and unless you are using a bad drive it will work as it handle two different model/make/size regular hard drives so having two faster drives (SSD) is not going to cause a singularity in the quantum wave function and cause a black hole. (the last part was mainly for the  ones screaming don't do it with not one fact as to why).

2. It is very reliable and use it on all my systems, well some its RAID 0 on two regular hard drives but also have RAID 0 with SSD's. I will say just like running with one drive or even RAID 1 you still have to backup to a separate drive if you truly want/value your data.

3. Its so worth it, that I do it on all my systems.