HDD RAID 0 worth it?

[Awesomeg1999]

So I've been considering this for a while now but didn't know if it would be worth it. I currently have a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R (yes I know, LGA 775 lol) which only has a SATA II Controller built in. Over the years I have amassed a collection of drives that are as follows: I have a SATA III 320 GB as my boot drive, another 320 (SATA II this time) as a backup drive, a SATA II 500 GB drive as a games drive (all of these are 7200 rpm) and I just got a 600 GB SATA II drive (2.5in, 5400 rpm) that I plan to use for backups. So I want to know if I can create a raid 0 array from the two 320 drives, and if I did, would it force the boot drive to run at SATA II speeds? Would that matter considering the board is SATA II anyway? And if I did create the raid array, how much of a performance boost would I see (and in what areas)? Would I be better off just saving up and getting a single 850 Pro (or Evo) SSD?

 

Thank you in advance!

[Guuhan]

Save up for a SSD. Will last you longer and you will not regret it ! Atleast I didn't regret my purchase of a 850 evo !

[rich1187]

Hello, RAID-0 won't give you significantly faster speeds, plus it will be less fail tolerable, so you'll be better off with SSD.

[daniellearmouth]

RAID is seldom ever worth it unless you have some form of backup.

RAID can fail much easier than standard AHCI if not handled properly. The general consensus is get one faster drive than use two drives in tandem for performance.

[iostermann]

Definitely save up for the SSD but if you really wanted, you could make a RAID 10 putting each smaller drive in a stripe with a larger drive then mirroring the sets so that you could get the speed boost from the SATA II to somewhere between probably 2-3.5x as fast for reads from all four drives at once. That way you'd have the redundancy in case of a drive failure and also the speed improvements of raid 0. If you have intel rapid storage on the mobo then I believe you could still use the unused portions of the larger disks as a jbod so you aren't wasting so much space with the mixed drive sizes.

[Captain_WD]

On 26.04.2016 г. at 1:11 PM, Awesomeg1999 said:

~snip~

Hey there

 

First off, if you plan on using the new 5,400 rpm drive as a real backup storage I would strongly recommend not to use it as an internal drive in the same system as your other drives. Any true backup drive should not be attached at all times to the system as it doesn't provide safety against power failures, physical damage of the case or other external factors. I would recommend using that drive externally either with an external enclosure or with a dock station for scheduled backups and then keep the drive disconnected. This should grant you safety against such problems and make it a true backup drive.

 

Second, RAID0 does feature some speed increases but it also adds on the risk for your data and requires a format of all drives that will be included in the RAID. If any of the drives in the array fails, you'd lose all data across all drives in the array. Moreover, many types of applications and usages don't really benefit from the faster performance. Gaming for example relies on the storage's performance only for the loading times and you won't notice any changes in the FPS or the graphics. For increasing the speed I would also recommend getting a SSD and doing a fresh install of the OS on it as well as all the applications and games (this is required with a fresh install).

 

Regarding the speeds, HDDs hardly reach the speed limit of SATAI bus, let alone SATAII and SATAIII. If a drive is labeled as a SATAIII that doesn't mean it is running at 600MB/s (which is the SATAIII speed limit). Since you have only SATAII ports on your motherboard and all SATA ports and connections are backward and forward compatible, your SATAIII drive is actually using SATAII speeds and it's running the same way it would run on a SATAIII port so you won't be changing that. You can imagine that like cars that run on a road where the car has a maximum speed of 60 while the road's limit is 100. It wouldn't make any difference if that car is running on a road with a limit of 100, 120 or 140 as all it can do is 60, but it is still certified to run on all those roads.

 

If you happen to have any questions at all, feel free to ask, I'd be happy to help!

 

Captain_WD.