Is the performance benefit of Raid 0 worth the risk?

[kev507]

Speed is important to me, I enjoy having a decent video card for high settings but honestly a fast boot time and buttery smooth program launching is even better. I recently used a computer with 4 Kingston 3K 240GB SSD's in RAID 0 and it blew me away, so my question is, with the supposed increase in reliability of modern SSD's (ie: samsung 850 series) do you think a significant speed boost is worth the increase risk of data loss, since the perceived risk of data loss seems to be going down?

[VincentiusIV]

IMO Yes. The drives wont fail frequentely anyway.

If you store important data on the raid 0 array, then backup the files once in a while to a hdd.

[X1XNobleX1X]

Speed is very important to me, I enjoy having a decent video card for high settings but honestly a fast boot time and buttery smooth program launching is even better. I recently used a computer with 4 Kingston 3K 240GB SSD's in RAID 0 and it blew me away, so my question is, with the supposed increase in reliability of modern SSD's (ie: samsung 850 series) do you think a significant speed boost is worth the increase risk of data loss, since the perceived risk of data loss seems to be going down?

Don't even bother, you're not going to see a difference at all. 

I wish I had not done it, just buy one large SSD. 

[Lays]

I don't think it's the drives that aren't reliable that causes failure etc, it's the controllers not being designed to handle 2x+ the read/write speeds that they're designed for.

[ShadowCaptain]

If you can afford to have you data backed up properly but run raid 0, yes its worth it

 

but do not run raid 0 drives if they are not correctly backed up

 

 

THAT said one really good SSD in a powerful PC is still really fast, heck even just 2 drives in raid 0 is enough I think 4 is overkill, I reckon get 2x 512gb ssds and get a cheap 1tb hard drive to keep a copy on

[Mo5]

Speed is important to me, I enjoy having a decent video card for high settings but honestly a fast boot time and buttery smooth program launching is even better. I recently used a computer with 4 Kingston 3K 240GB SSD's in RAID 0 and it blew me away, so my question is, with the supposed increase in reliability of modern SSD's (ie: samsung 850 series) do you think a significant speed boost is worth the increase risk of data loss, since the perceived risk of data loss seems to be going down?

Yes, just keep the sensitive data on another drive. SSDs are super reliable.

[kev507]

If you can afford to have you data backed up properly but run raid 0, yes its worth it

 

but do not run raid 0 drives if they are not correctly backed up

definitely agree with this, I have crashplan backup software and a wd my cloud, so I normally have 3 copies of any important data

[ShadowCaptain]

definitely agree with this, I have crashplan backup software and a wd my cloud, so I normally have 3 copies of any important data

 

 yes 3 copies is absolutely the best method I like to have the data, a physical copy and a cloud copy at all times

 

my server runs raid 10 too

[FlighterLuid]

As long as you don't do it the way Linus does it (8 refurbed SSDs in RAID 0) then you're fine. Any critical data should have a backup anyway.

[EcoBoost]

I don't think it's the drives that aren't reliable that causes failure etc, it's the controllers not being designed to handle 2x+ the read/write speeds that they're designed for.

The drives will still be read from and written to at the same speeds per drive as they are designed. It's the SATA controller on the mobo that's running at 2x, which on modern chipsets is perfectly able to handle two SSDs.

[Dimwitted]

Not worth it at all. Especially with Samsungs. Those dazzling speeds are just benchmarking numbers. The RW performance is no better than a good drive which the 850 certainly is. The 850 is already maxing out the Sata bus as it is. You *can't* feed it any more data.

[iDeJayDzn]

The drives will still be read from and written to at the same speeds per drive as they are designed. It's the SATA controller on the mobo that's running at 2x, which on modern chipsets is perfectly able to handle two SSDs.

 

It's weird see'ing a girl know about computers. 

[IdeaStormer]

And RAID is super mature, stable, and solid, that's why almost all mobo vendor's include it as default, be it RAID 0, RAID 1, etc. Back in the day you had to pay extra for it because it was costly and well a benefit they were or wanted to charge you for, the chipsets have it included now due to the advances in tech and its included by almost default now.

 

Of course if you're the type to pull the power plug from your computer as a joke then RAID is not for you. If you shutdown properly and safely as most computer users do you'll be fine, if you don't you'll also screw up a non-RAID drive, eventually.

[DirkW]

For me, personally the "risk" is not the reason, why I don't use RAID0 in my rig(s) anymore.
 
What most people, who bring up that argument, say "Oh if your boot drive is actually a RAID0 with 2 drives, if only one of them fails, the whole system is gone. Which is true. But is it any better, if you have only a single boot drive and have that one fail? No. In both cases you're screwed - unless you have a backup. So, doing backups regularly is nothing that should only be recommended to RAID0 users.
 
While yes, statistically the risk of having a drive fail actually is higher with two drives, for me that risk is not a valid argument (especially not a boot / application / game drive) - for data storage, that's a whole different story.
 
So why don't I use it, if I'm not afraid of the risk? Simple. IMO it's not worth the hassle. Making sure BIOS is set to RAID mode, having the RAID controller initialize at boot (which can make booting take longer than with single disk), and the overall limited real world use: on small files, you won't really notice much of a difference outside of benchmarks. Access times don't improve much (if at all) and if a 100kB file takes 0.0002s (at 500MB/s*) or 0.0001s (at 1000MB/s*) to be transferred (* I know files that small will not get max transfers rates, but feel free to take out two orders of magnitude)... handling large files / larger amounts of data, of course there will be performance benefits. But how often do you load several GBs into your RAM? (and how often does it really make a difference to you, whether that takes 5s or 10s)? And as soon as you are copying data from or to somewhere else (a local HDD or a NAS/server for example), you will be limited by that other connection - so no gain over a single SSD at all any more. For me it's just not worth it. But of course YMMV.
 
So yes, if you want to squeeze out every last ounce of speed, go for RAID0, as it really does perform better. Will it perform so much better than a good single SSD that you will really feel a benefit from it? 99% of users probably won't.

[SammyG145]

I wouldn't do it, I ran two 840s in RAID 0. Was amazing, really fast load times. But when one of them died it completely messed everything up. I have a 840 Evo and it's just as fast as the two 840s I had in RAID 0.

[TheGeekster]

If you want fast, you want a PCIe SSD drive, but otherwise I've run raid 0 SSD's before, and meh, yes at first the speed is impressive but, then you get to day to day usage... I went back to single SSD and used the other in my laptop in the end

[Columbo]

I have two RAID 0's. One SSD and the other HDD. They have run flawlessly. 

[wpirobotbuilder]

RAID 0 with hard drives doesn't make much sense anymore, unless you need lots of storage space and lots of sequential transfer speed. SSDs make sense for everything else.

 

RAID 0 with SSDs is much more reliable than RAID 0 with hard drives. The biggest problem with a RAID 0 is upgradability -- if you want to switch from a RAID 0 of one drive type (say, 840 EVO) to another type (say, 850 Pro), then you will have a hard time with that. You cannot replace drives one by one with a RAID 0, you will have to copy all the data off, then copy it all back to the new array. You also will have to buy all the new drives at once, which will cost a lot.

 

I would go with a RAID 5. It will perform great with all the SSDs, and will allow you to upgrade the drives one at a time.