Raid levels question

[VelikiPCguy]

Hey all, I've seen a bit of this discussion floating around but I'm a complete beginner in PC building so I'd appreciate any input.

 

What are RAID levels 0, 1, 2, etc.? Do they matter for gaming? Are they something you have to activate / deactivate manually on your PC, will it affect performance?

Thanks!

[Skiiwee29]

<-- Moved to Storage Devices -->

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, NewwGuyy123 said:

Do they matter for gaming?

No.

1 minute ago, NewwGuyy123 said:

Are they something you have to activate / deactivate manually on your PC, will it affect performance?

Yes, a RAID is something one has to go out of their way to set up and yes, RAID can affect performance, depending on what one does and how it's set up. That said, it won't give you any better performance in games and, since you're a newbie, RAID isn't something you should even be thinking about anyways.

[SorryBella]

2 minutes ago, NewwGuyy123 said:

What are RAID levels 0, 1, 2, etc.?

Linus have explained the 5 common RAID modes in early episodes of Techquickie. Other common ones are Raid Z and Unraid Parity.

3 minutes ago, NewwGuyy123 said:

Do they matter for gaming?

If you ask this back when SSD costs an entire new PC, yes. Putting 2 hard drives in RAID 0 makes load times faster overall but now with advent of SSD and more efficient game compression, not really. Nowadays, theyre heavily used for either High Input Output operations like high bitrate and resolution video editing (and even those a huge amount of people have moved to SSD too)

6 minutes ago, NewwGuyy123 said:

Are they something you have to activate / deactivate manually on your PC

Yep, youll need to enable it on your own on 2 drives.

[VelikiPCguy]

16 hours ago, SorryClaire said:

Linus have explained the 5 common RAID modes in early episodes of Techquickie. Other common ones are Raid Z and Unraid Parity.

If you ask this back when SSD costs an entire new PC, yes. Putting 2 hard drives in RAID 0 makes load times faster overall but now with advent of SSD and more efficient game compression, not really. Nowadays, theyre heavily used for either High Input Output operations like high bitrate and resolution video editing (and even those a huge amount of people have moved to SSD too)

Yep, youll need to enable it on your own on 2 drives.

Ah that's very informative, thank you! So conclusion being RAID is useful if you want to back up your data (which you can do nowadays with things like Backblaze anyway), and it can speed up your SSD performance, but since modern SSDs are already so fast, it won't make any additional improvement for gaming purposes, correct?

[SorryBella]

10 minutes ago, NewwGuyy123 said:

RAID is useful if you want to back up your data (which you can do nowadays with things like Backblaze anyway)

RAID IS NOT A BACKUP.

 

Seriously, i dont know how many RAID rebuild nightmares data recovery organizations go through because users think that RAID is a substitute for backup. Its not, its what people call Redundancy.

 

Imagine it like in the case that spotify is down, you got youtube or your local music file to keep the tune going. Thats redundancy. Backup would be you saving all of those spotify music into your system and copying it somewhere else (i know this is where the anecdote falls apart but im sticking with it)

 

10 minutes ago, NewwGuyy123 said:

and it can speed up your SSD performance

It can speed up any form of storage in general that supports it because you basically have 2 or more data tunnels the files can go through instead of just 1 (in the case of RAID 0). But of course that comes at the literal monetary cost of 2 or more physical storage medium instead of one (and this needs to be identical between all drives you wanna RAID). Its not limited to SSD, and in fact, you dont RAID SSDs unless you need bleeding edge performance now, you usually RAID Hard Drives. And again, its not always performance, its redundancy.

 

[VelikiPCguy]

32 minutes ago, SorryClaire said:

RAID IS NOT A BACKUP.

 

Seriously, i dont know how many RAID rebuild nightmares data recovery organizations go through because users think that RAID is a substitute for backup. Its not, its what people call Redundancy.

 

Imagine it like in the case that spotify is down, you got youtube or your local music file to keep the tune going. Thats redundancy. Backup would be you saving all of those spotify music into your system and copying it somewhere else (i know this is where the anecdote falls apart but im sticking with it)

 

It can speed up any form of storage in general that supports it because you basically have 2 or more data tunnels the files can go through instead of just 1 (in the case of RAID 0). But of course that comes at the literal monetary cost of 2 or more physical storage medium instead of one (and this needs to be identical between all drives you wanna RAID). Its not limited to SSD, and in fact, you dont RAID SSDs unless you need bleeding edge performance now, you usually RAID Hard Drives. And again, its not always performance, its redundancy.

 

Thank you for the in-depth explanation, that makes sense.

 

So in my case, if I'm getting the Samsung 980 PRO 2TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe 3D Nand, and my primary purpose is gaming, you reckon I wouldn't need to buy two of them and then connect (might not be the best word, but w/e) them through RAID? I'm trying to build a true beast gaming PC with all the latest bells and whistles, probably in the $5k range, but if something is COMPLETELY redundant (pun intended), then I'd not want to spend an extra $400-500 just for the sake of it