A few questions regarding RAID

[-iSynthesis]

I have about 70€ left to spend and something i could afford would either be another ssd or another hdd. If I'd buy one of those, i would set them up in RAID 0, so now my questions:

 

-When i add a 2nd SSD (OS is installed on the 1st SSD) and configure them in RAID 0, do i have to reinstall Windows?

 

-When i add a 2nd HDD (Steam Library) and configure them in RAID 0, will the data remain and split onto the 2 drives?

 

Thanks for any help!

 

*Edit, SSD not HDD, sorry guys.

[cesrai]

Why do you need Raid 0?? I would say don't and get a HDD for that money.

[-iSynthesis]

Why do you need Raid 0?? I would say don't and get a HDD for that money.

Because i dont want to have so many different harddrives seen in windows, if I RAID 0 them i only have "1" harddrive seen in windows also it'll be faster.

[dragoon20005]

first

 

RAIDing your SSD and HDD will reduce the performance of the SSD greatly

 

RAID will need both drives to be re-formated and combined together

 

and yes in practice RAID 0 will split the data into even and odd parity so the odd parity data is in the first drive and the even in the second drive

[cesrai]

Because i dont want to have so many different harddrives seen in windows, if I RAID 0 them i only have "1" harddrive seen in windows also it'll be faster.

You won't notice the difference it isn't like you are shooting Raw 4K videos, get an SSD and an HDD it's better for you.

[-iSynthesis]

first

 

RAIDing your SSD and HDD will reduce the performance of the SSD greatly

 

RAID will need both drives to be re-formated and combined together

 

and yes in practice RAID 0 will split the data into even and odd parity so the odd parity data is in the first drive and the even in the second drive

No . I want to either buy a hdd or a ssd and raid the ssd/hdd ill buy with the existing ssd/hdd, sorry. 

[-iSynthesis]

You won't notice the difference it isn't like you are shooting Raw 4K videos, get an SSD and an HDD it's better for you.

I do notice a difference in speed when recording with fraps though. As said, i already have both of them, id like to upgrade either the hdd or the ssd to raid them with my existing ssd/hdd

[Dimwitted]

You would be better to get a larger ssd on just use that instead of the slow 120gb Sandisk. I love how you feel that running a RAID is somehow simpler than having another drive. Not likely. And RAIDing anything means you wipe the drives. Period.

[cesrai]

I do notice a difference in speed when recording with fraps though. As said, i already have both of them, id like to upgrade either the hdd or the ssd to raid them with my existing ssd/hdd

What do you mean by that?? you are using a Xenon and fraps is CPU heavy it shouldn't have that big of an impact, if you mean by when you are recording of course you will notice you are writing to the HDD and reading at the same time.

[EmeraldFlame]

No . I want to either buy a hdd or a ssd and raid the ssd/hdd ill buy with the existing ssd/hdd, sorry. 

 

There are a whole host of reasons why this is a bad idea, and not only like kind of a bad idea, its a really bad idea. I am telling you this as a computer sciences professional that actively works in the field on a daily basis.

 

1. You are going to lose a significant portion of the space on your hard drive. RAID 0 is really designed for drives that are the same size. If drives aren't the same size, it will automatically partition them to be the same size, and you will be left with a bunch of freespace. Unless you pay a ton of money to get a giant SSD. Technically you could then partition the leftover space as another drive letter, but you have been stating you wanted to do this to strictly get away from it.

2. You have now increased your failure rate exponentially. If the HDD or SSD goes out, you will lose all the information on both. You better have a really solid backup plan ready.

 

3. Operating systems handle SSDs and HDDs in slightly different ways, in a mixed RAID environment like this, there is no telling whether things will be handled optimally.

 

4. You will likely lose TRIM support. A lot of modern RAID controllers can pass TRIM through it, but once again in a mixed environment like this, it is hard to tell if or how well this would work. Without TRIM you would see serious performance degradation over time.

 

5. In many ways you will actually be SLOWING down your SSD. Random IO, like opening programs and booting windows, is going to be significantly slowed because of the HDD's seek time. Sequential reads will likely be faster, but in all honesty unless you are working on large video files or something most of your sequential reads are likely to be small and quick anyway.

 

6. Any professional that didn't get hired because he was the bosses friend will tell you that in all honesty your windows installation should be on a different partition. Heck, even when a computer has 1 hard drive, it should be partitioned and windows installed separately from general storage. If for some reason you need to restore a backup or reinstall windows, this makes it infinitely easier without affecting your important files.

 

But to answer your questions:

 

1 -When i add a 2nd HDD (OS is installed on the 1st SSD) and configure them in RAID 0, do i have to reinstall Windows?

 

2 -When i add a 2nd HDD (Steam Library) and configure them in RAID 0, will the data remain and split onto the 2 drives?

 

1. This actually kind of depends. Typically yes, you will have to wipe and reinstall windows, and in fact that is what I would recommend. However, some software RAID programs like Intel's Rapid Storage Technology does allow you to make a raid with data on the disk. However, with this approach you can run into a lot of weird issues.

 

2. As stated before, most RAID solutions are going to have you completely wipe both drives and you are going to have to start fresh. But with Intel's Rapid Storage Technology, the software will automatically strip the files for you across the drive.

 

As said above, this really isn't a situation for RAID. You are going to see the best performance by keeping the drives separate. If you REALLY want to combine them for some reason, I would look into the caching technology that WIndows has. It effectively turns your HDD into an hybrid drive by using an SSD as a large cache. I think this is limited to a 64GB cache however. But I wouldn't even really recommend that. Keep the drives separate, you will be better off in the long run.

[Captain_WD]

I have about 70€ left to spend and something i could afford would either be another ssd or another hdd. If I'd buy one of those, i would set them up in RAID 0, so now my questions:

 

-When i add a 2nd HDD (OS is installed on the 1st SSD) and configure them in RAID 0, do i have to reinstall Windows?

 

-When i add a 2nd HDD (Steam Library) and configure them in RAID 0, will the data remain and split onto the 2 drives?

 

Thanks for any help!

 

Hey -iSynthesis,

 

First of all, I would support the guys' opinion that RAID 0 is a bad choice for data and is a bit pointless for a bootable drive as it might actually increase your initial boot time of your build.

Creating a RAID0 formats both drives and thus erases all data on them. You would lose all info that you have there if you don't back it up.

With RAID0 all drives work at the speed of the slowest one, in your case - the SSD will be slowed down to the HDD's speed, which I find pointless.

RAID0 doubles the chance of data loss since if either drive fails, you lose all data on both drives (this is the nature of RAID0 - no fault tolerance).

I would consider getting either another SSD, but use it separately, or simply get a larger HDD for your storage files and media and simply leave all high-demanding programs for your boot SSD.

 

Captain_WD.

[-iSynthesis]

What do you mean by that?? you are using a Xenon and fraps is CPU heavy it shouldn't have that big of an impact, if you mean by when you are recording of course you will notice you are writing to the HDD and reading at the same time.

I experienced big fps differences going from a external hdd to my barracuda while using fraps, more than 10-15fps depending on the game so i do expect a bit of an upgrade but i mainly am looking into having more storage space but I'd rather have one drive detected by windows because that would be easier to manage.

[-iSynthesis]

There are a whole host of reasons why this is a bad idea, and not only like kind of a bad idea, its a really bad idea. I am telling you this as a computer sciences professional that actively works in the field on a daily basis.

 

1. You are going to lose a significant portion of the space on your hard drive. RAID 0 is really designed for drives that are the same size. If drives aren't the same size, it will automatically partition them to be the same size, and you will be left with a bunch of freespace. Unless you pay a ton of money to get a giant SSD. Technically you could then partition the leftover space as another drive letter, but you have been stating you wanted to do this to strictly get away from it.

2. You have now increased your failure rate exponentially. If the HDD or SSD goes out, you will lose all the information on both. You better have a really solid backup plan ready.

 

3. Operating systems handle SSDs and HDDs in slightly different ways, in a mixed RAID environment like this, there is no telling whether things will be handled optimally.

 

4. You will likely lose TRIM support. A lot of modern RAID controllers can pass TRIM through it, but once again in a mixed environment like this, it is hard to tell if or how well this would work. Without TRIM you would see serious performance degradation over time.

 

5. In many ways you will actually be SLOWING down your SSD. Random IO, like opening programs and booting windows, is going to be significantly slowed because of the HDD's seek time. Sequential reads will likely be faster, but in all honesty unless you are working on large video files or something most of your sequential reads are likely to be small and quick anyway.

 

6. Any professional that didn't get hired because he was the bosses friend will tell you that in all honesty your windows installation should be on a different partition. Heck, even when a computer has 1 hard drive, it should be partitioned and windows installed separately from general storage. If for some reason you need to restore a backup or reinstall windows, this makes it infinitely easier without affecting your important files.

 

But to answer your questions:

 

 

1. This actually kind of depends. Typically yes, you will have to wipe and reinstall windows, and in fact that is what I would recommend. However, some software RAID programs like Intel's Rapid Storage Technology does allow you to make a raid with data on the disk. However, with this approach you can run into a lot of weird issues.

 

2. As stated before, most RAID solutions are going to have you completely wipe both drives and you are going to have to start fresh. But with Intel's Rapid Storage Technology, the software will automatically strip the files for you across the drive.

 

As said above, this really isn't a situation for RAID. You are going to see the best performance by keeping the drives separate. If you REALLY want to combine them for some reason, I would look into the caching technology that WIndows has. It effectively turns your HDD into an hybrid drive by using an SSD as a large cache. I think this is limited to a 64GB cache however. But I wouldn't even really recommend that. Keep the drives separate, you will be better off in the long run.

Im sorry if i wrote this like completly wrong, im quite bad at english but i meant it this way:

I have one ssd and one hdd right now. I have the choice of either buying one hdd or one ssd, if i would buy the hdd i would raid0 it with my current hdd and if i would buy the ssd i would raid0 it with my current ssd.

But thanks a lot, going to have to do a back up of the drive then.

[EmeraldFlame]

Im sorry if i wrote this like completly wrong, im quite bad at english but i meant it this way:

I have one ssd and one hdd right now. I have the choice of either buying one hdd or one ssd, if i would buy the hdd i would raid0 it with my current hdd and if i would buy the ssd i would raid0 it with my current ssd.

But thanks a lot, going to have to do a back up of the drive then.

 

Oh alright, it seems like I and many others here misunderstood you. 

In that case the following are things you would have to consider:

Raid 0 on 2 SSDs:

• You may loose TRIM support. This is very dependent on the RAID controller, the SSD and OS you are using. Before buying something I would contact the manufacturers of both the raid controller (or mobo if using built in raid) and the manufacturers of the SSD and make sure it supports TRIM through RAID. Without TRIM an SSDs performance will degrade relatively rapidly.
• Once again, you run into the issue that if 1 drive dies the data on both is lost. Make sure you have a good backup procedure in place before you do this.
• You probably won't see any real-world performance improvements. At the speeds of 2 SSDs in RAID 0 your bottleneck speed is going to be each drives seek time, while fast in SSDs it will still be slow enough your probably won't see any improvements except for large sequential reads or writes, which unless you do a ton of video editing, you probably won't encounter much.

Raid 0 on HDDs:

• The biggest issue here is once again data integrity. If you lose one drive you lose both. You will need a robust backup solution of some sort in place.

It really depends on how much space you need? Need a lot more space, go HDD. Only need a little, go SSD. In either case though, unless you have a large NAS or something else that you can run frequent backups to, you are probably better off leaving them as separate drives for data integrity. If you have a backup solution in place or your data is easily replaceable then go for it.