RAID 0 vs Single Drive

[Kuzma]

I've got a question, do I go for 3 320gb drives in RAID 0 or do I go with a 1 TB drive?

After formatting both of these would result in thse sizes:

RAID 0 = 894.06

1TB = 921.6

 

So would the 27.54GB loss be made up for in speed?

[wpirobotbuilder]

You will have significantly higher speeds. The likelihood of your RAID dying will be three times that of those drives. Unless this is for a scratch disk or something non-critical, don't bother.

[grayperview]

Better solution would be 1tb single drive, and 2x320GB in raid 0, obvously you can get different sized drives to suite your needs, but 2x in raid and 1 single drive is a better option that 3 in raid.

 

That way you can backup important stuff. providing you have the money to do it.

 

I run 2 sata II's 750GB drives in raid 0 myself, along with a 250 and 320GB as seperate drives and the performance is good, I am in no rush to get a SSD put it that way.

[Kuzma]

Okay so I had a crazy idea xD what if I split one of the drives in half and did RAID 0 on both creating two different 480GB raid arrays? meaning I could afford to lose one drive and still keep data

[grayperview]

Raid doesn't work that way, Raid uses the whole drive

 

For example if you pair up a 320 and a 250GB it will use 250GB on each drive make the array, you won't be able to use the 70GB that is unused.

 

If you give a me your budget ill help you find the best solution for you.

[Kuzma]

Raid doesn't work that way, Raid uses the whole drive

 

For example if you pair up a 320 and a 250GB it will use 250GB on each drive make the array, you won't be able to use the 70GB that is unused.

 

If you give a me your budget ill help you find the best solution for you.

Even on a software raid? O.o I believe someone told me a software raid can use pifferent partitions

and my budget is £50 ^_^ good luck

[grayperview]

even if you could its totally pointless, as its still only using 1 hdd and there would be zero performance gain.

 

For raid you need a minimum of 2 disks....

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

 

£50 isn't going to get you raid and a back up option. or even just raid.

 

A WD black, performance Hard drive......is probably the fastest solution you will get for £55, other than a low capacity SSD.

 

http://www.ebuyer.com/394432-wd-500gb-black-desktop-drive-wd5003azex

[Kuzma]

You seem to have misunderstood I meant having two drives full 320GB and one drive split into two 160GB partitions and that drive having one partition in a RAID 0 Array with one drive and another in a RAID 0 Array with another drive giving me some degree of Redundancy (Btw found these ) three of them works out to £53 :p

[grayperview]

No the array needs to use the whole drive, them drives only have 8mb of cache, they will be really slow....not worth bothering with.

 

you can't split a drive into partitions and have one partition part of the a raid array and the other not......doesn't work like that

[Godlygamer23]

RAID 10 would be better than RAID 0 and a single drive.

[IdeaStormer]

If you truly want  faster drive speeds (aka IO speeds) do the RAID 0, if you don't really care for speed then one drive.

 

But do remember if one drive of the RAID array dies you lose all the data, but then again if you lose the one drive you lose it all so don't think one drive will last you any longer because 2 drives in a RAID array theoretically has a higher chance of failure. As you probably know theory is theory and reality is a whole other matter, drives are very solid these days and I have both HDD and SSD's in RAID 0 (different systems) and they are still alive running along just fine. Sure I have ruined a RAID 0 array in my time but the drives were fine just had a driver bug that BSOD my system too many times and eventually corrupted the RAID array, but I've had that happen on single drive systems as well, bug's a bug RAID or no RAID.

 

As for your pseudo RAID, well if you can find a Software RAID that will allow what you want then have at it, I personally wouldn't Software RAID a Windows system, but have and do use Software RAID on Linux systems but they tend to have those features better supported (for free, that's my qualifier for that).

[ErickS89]

Here's my solution.

Go with 5x 250GB SSDs in Raid 10

and go with 3X 1TB drives in Raid0.

[EricX2]

You seem to have misunderstood I meant having two drives full 320GB and one drive split into two 160GB partitions and that drive having one partition in a RAID 0 Array with one drive and another in a RAID 0 Array with another drive giving me some degree of Redundancy (Btw found these ) three of them works out to £53 :P

You can't partition a drive before RAID. Configuring RAID is way before the partition stage of a hard drive. It's at a BIOS level, the partitions are more of an OS level if that makes sense.

 

You can partition a RAID but you can't RAID a partition. :)

[IdeaStormer]

You can't partition a drive before RAID. Configuring RAID is way before the partition stage of a hard drive. It's at a BIOS level, the partitions are more of an OS level if that makes sense.

 

You can partition a RAID but you can't RAID a partition. :)

 

Well I will give you you can't RAID a partition for the host OS but I can do that on a VM ;)  Never say never or close to that or even imply it :P

[EricX2]

Well I will give you you can't RAID a partition for the host OS but I can do that on a VM ;)  Never say never or close to that or even imply it :P

Over my head! :)

 

Only VM I know involves vmdk files.