Some questions about RAID 0

[SGM]

I know that in RAID 0 the total capacity is increased with subsequent drives in the array however I am curious about the potential increases in read\write speeds.

I know that two HDDs\SDDs in RAID 0 are faster than a single drive so would adding a third or fourth drive to the array increase the speed again?
If yes, is there a limit to how much more you can get out of it? (I'm guessing SATA 3 speeds at the moment).

 

[CoolaxGaming]

Well it should double/triple/quadrople speeds. This is happening because the data is striped.

I am not an expert on RAID, but with a mobo raid controller it shouldnt triple but be like 2.5 times the speed. And in a raid card it should triple.

Again that is just my assumption, I watching Linuss video on it and probably forgot somethingaa

[SMURG]

SATA 3 speeds aren't actually a limiting factor, since each drive has its own SATA interface. Whilst you get into diminishing returns when adding new drives, in theory you should be able to keep adding drives and seeing further (if smaller and smaller) increases in speed each time. Bear in mind however that a single drive failure will render the entire array unuseable, so don't go putting 10 drives in RAID 0 if you're not cool with losing it all lol.

[Enderman]

http://www.corsair.com/en-ca/blog/2014/may/who_needs_sata_express

[Will_Man_Dude]

SATA 3 speeds aren't actually a limiting factor, since each drive has its own SATA interface. Whilst you get into diminishing returns when adding new drives, in theory you should be able to keep adding drives and seeing further (if smaller and smaller) increases in speed each time. Bear in mind however that a single drive failure will render the entire array unuseable, so don't go putting 10 drives in RAID 0 if you're not cool with losing it all lol.

Remember linus did that with 128gb refurb ssds and the whole do as I say not as I do thing was employed.

[TheKDub]

I know that in RAID 0 the total capacity is increased with subsequent drives in the array however I am curious about the potential increases in read\write speeds.

I know that two HDDs\SDDs in RAID 0 are faster than a single drive so would adding a third or fourth drive to the array increase the speed again?

If yes, is there a limit to how much more you can get out of it? (I'm guessing SATA 3 speeds at the moment).

 

 

RAID 0 with 2 drives would be roughly 2x the speed of one drive, 3 drives roughly 3x, 4 drives roughly 4x, (Those amounts are not incredibly accurate as each new drive added will have a less and less significant increase on performance, think of it sort of SLI or CF, just because you have 4 GPUs CF'd or SLI'd, doesn't mean you have 4x the performance of a single card)

 

The increase in performance also depends on the quality of the RAID card, a mobo RAID card won't be nearly as good as one that you would put in a PCIe slot/

[SGM]

http://www.corsair.com/en-ca/blog/2014/may/who_needs_sata_express

Interesting to see. I kinda thought that after a point you'd get diminishing returns. Seems like 3 or 4 is the sweet spot (assuming you're happy with buying that many SSDs ). 

 

SATA 3 speeds aren't actually a limiting factor, since each drive has its own SATA interface. Whilst you get into diminishing returns when adding new drives, in theory you should be able to keep adding drives and seeing further (if smaller and smaller) increases in speed each time. Bear in mind however that a single drive failure will render the entire array unuseable, so don't go putting 10 drives in RAID 0 if you're not cool with losing it all lol.

Yeah, loosing it all would suck.

RAID 10 might be an option but it'd be considerably more expensive. 

Thanks for the replies, everyone! 

[zlolslavez]

 

Interesting to see. I kinda thought that after a point you'd get diminishing returns. Seems like 3 or 4 is the sweet spot (assuming you're happy with buying that many SSDs  ). 

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Yeah, loosing it all would suck. 

RAID 10 might be an option but it'd be considerably more expensive. 

Thanks for the replies, everyone! 

Just keep in mind that the more drives you add to RAID 0, the more chance of a failure there is (if one drive dies you have X-1 useless drives in which need to be reformatted [and will most likely die soon afterwards]) and if you add more drives, it generally won't become less efficient, but technically the more drives you add, the less of a benefit it becomes exponentially. (1 to 2 drives will "double speeds", but two to three will only increase speeds by 50%. Everything I said is obvious oh well.

[SMURG]

Interesting to see. I kinda thought that after a point you'd get diminishing returns. Seems like 3 or 4 is the sweet spot (assuming you're happy with buying that many SSDs ). 

 

Yeah, loosing it all would suck.

RAID 10 might be an option but it'd be considerably more expensive. 

Thanks for the replies, everyone! 

Personally I'm a big fan of RAID 5. I've used RAID 0 for boot drives before though.

[sirtoby]

 

RAID 10 might be an option but it'd be considerably more expensive. 

Thanks for the replies, everyone! 

I'm running 2 64GB Adata SP900 in Raid0 as my boot drive. If one of the drives fails is irrelevant since I have cloud backups of my important files. Go for raid 0 with two drives or raid 5 (high cpu usage though) with three. raid 10 for a boot drive is a waste of money imo

[Captain_WD]

I know that in RAID 0 the total capacity is increased with subsequent drives in the array however I am curious about the potential increases in read\write speeds.

I know that two HDDs\SDDs in RAID 0 are faster than a single drive so would adding a third or fourth drive to the array increase the speed again?

If yes, is there a limit to how much more you can get out of it? (I'm guessing SATA 3 speeds at the moment).

 

 

 

Hey SGM26, 

 

RAID0 enables the data to be split and written or read simultaneously between all drives in the array. Theoretically, if you have two drives in RAID0, the speed would be double. If you have four drives - quadruple. There is some speed cut for the data to be split and put back together, but in general the speed increases are huge. Here's an example between using HDDs and SSDs in RAID0: games rely on storage only for their loading times and FPS and graphics will not be affected at all. Here's an example of the speed boost when using SSDs and HDDs: The jump in load times from HDD to SSD is like 10s to 1s. RAID 0 effectively (theoretically) halves the load time. So if you were to RAID 0 mechanical drives, it's 10s to 5s. You derive 5s of benefit. If you were to RAID 0 SSDs instead, its like 1s to 0.5s. You derive 0.5s of benefit. Just to demonstrate that striping SSDs is nowhere as beneficial compared to mechanical drives. 

 

The BIG downside of RAID0 would be the complete lack of redundancy and the increased chance of data loss. Due to its nature, if a drive fails or drops of the array, you would lose all data on the array. Basically, the chance of data loss due to drive failure would be two, three or more times higher (depending on how many drive you are using) PLUS the chance of a drive dropping out of the RAID array due to lack of synchronization. 

 

Captain_WD.