RAID Uses

TheNewPCMan · March 9, 2017

I am building a new pc and am going to use a 500gb SSD and a 2tb HDD. I am using my rig mostly for gaming with a little bit of content creation as well. I may also want to set up a virtual machine later. I have heard a lot of builds that set up RAID 0 in the UEFI but I'm not entirely sure why. Should I be using RAID 0? If not, what should I use?

VVoltor · March 9, 2017

You can't RAID a 500gb SSD with a 2tb HDD.

You can get either another SSD or HDD and use RAID 0 for extra speed, but less reliability, or RAID 1 for the same speed and basically a have backup of that drive.

Check the TechQuicky video about RAID if you want more info.

For your use case I don't see a lot of benefit from either RAID 0 or 1, an extra SSD to use as a scratch disk for video editing would be nice.

WMGroomAK · March 9, 2017

4 minutes ago, TheNewPCMan said:

I am building a new pc and am going to use a 500gb SSD and a 2tb HDD. I am using my rig mostly for gaming with a little bit of content creation as well. I may also want to set up a virtual machine later. I have heard a lot of builds that set up RAID 0 in the UEFI but I'm not entirely sure why. Should I be using RAID 0? If not, what should I use?

RAID 0 is mainly used in order to combine multiple drives into a single volume on your system and get some increased read/write performance since the data is being written across multiple drives.

Mira Yurizaki · March 9, 2017

To start, you have to have disks of similar size and performance to use RAID effectively. You can probably use an SSD with an HDD, but you'll be crippling the performance to just the HDD. Though I don't know if RAID controllers these days will even let you mix and match.

RAID0 is only needed if you want extra performance out of your storage systems at the cost of reliability. If any of the RAID0 drives fail, the entire thing fails.

RAID1 is if you need reliability over performance. You can lose all but one of the RAID1 disks. Your capacity and write performance is the same as 1 drive, but reading performance can go up.

RAID5 is if you want a mix of reliability and performance. However this requires at the minimum of 3 disks.

Most people don't really need to use RAID, to start. And even then, most people opt for RAID5 if not RAID1.