A few questions about RAID

[Dubesta11]

I hear a lot of people who have a raid setup are generally happy, and this is my current understanding for a 2 drive array:

 

Raid 0- Uses 2 drives to from a larger drive, has about double the read/write speed, double the space, and has little fault tolerance (one drive fails, very bad)

 

Raid 1- Uses 2 drives set up in mirrored array, has double the read (but only the write of one drive) speed, the space of one drive, and a high fault tolerance (one drive can completely fail.

 

Now, would any of these be useful in my setup? I am running a Sandisk Ultra Plus 256GB as well as a WB Blue 1TB. Most of my important files are stored on the HDD, and games are on the SSD. What should I do? 

[Jobobee]

You could use the HDD as a backup for the SSD, but it wouldn't make much sense as SSDs tend to out live HDDs. And that wouldn't even use RAID.

[ShadowCaptain]

do not raid an SSD with an HDD

 

You would limit the speed to the speed of the HDD and the storage would only be twice the size of the SSD in raid 1

 

You could set up caching if your SSD supports it or just install your OS on the SSD and keep the HDD for mass storage

[Guest]

Only use raid with identical drives

[Ahnzh]

just run it the way you used to, raid makes sense if you have 2 identical drives. if you don't have, the one with the less stats respectively dictates what you get out of a RAID. that means 1. access times, 2. transfer speeds, 3. space. 

[IdeaStormer]

You can run RAID on your SSD and HDD, but it would not be optimal.

 

In RAID 0, you would end up with a 512GB drive, 768GB of space on the HDD would never be used and the SSD would run as fast as the HDD basically reducing your SSD to a HDD in performance. Again, you could but it would not be the best use of your drives, and the 768GB of HDD space unused is not useable at all, not even a separate partition for some random files, its would be inaccessible. Speeds would be as good as two HDD's in RAID 0.

 

In RAID 1, again you would only use 256GB of the 1TB HDD, because you'd be mirroring your 256GB of the SSD onto the HDD and vice versa. Again, you'd be wasting the extra 768GB of the HDD as you still can't use it in RAID 1. Speeds again would limited due to the HDD.

 

Now that being said, I have run a RAID 0 on a 320GB and a 1.5TB drive, and it was fine or needed for the RAID 0 speed and we didn't have identical drives at that time so different sizes are doable just not optimal as you waste space, then again give certain constraints it may be fine, like its the only drives you have and need to do RAID 0 or RAID 1. I have yet to try RAID with an SSD and HDD but in theory it should work but its just a waste of an SSD as in you won't get the speeds of an SSD in that combo, but if its all you have and need to do it yes its possible.