HDD in RAID 0?

[Nikolacar4]

Hello,simple question... Can i use two hard drives and then raid them? (Raid 0) what performance gains would i get?

[dizmo]

You can, but there are more downsides than upsides depending on what you're using it for.

[Oshino Shinobu]

Yes, you can. It will make sequential read/writes faster, theoretically doubling them, but it doesn't really work like that. 

 

Small random read/writes can actually go down depending on the stripe size. 

 

Chances of losing data more than doubles as if either drive dies or if the array dies or is corrupted, you lose all data. In general, RAID 0 is basically never worth it. 

[MrImnotMLG]

A.) Yes, you can use two HDD in RAID

B.) Common sense would dictate a doubling in speed but that's not always the case. There could be limitation with some hardware but it should double your speed.

[seagate_surfer]

Yes it can be done, but offers no redundancy which is a primary reason people want RAID. If you can afford a couple more hard drives, you could go RAID 10, which is like a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1 so that you get both redundancy and performance boost.

Also here is an interactive tool on Synology's (a popular NAS vendor) website which has been really useful in playing around with different RAID ideas.

[Nikolacar4]

Thank you for all the answers... If i have 2x160gb drives? Will raid0 have 320gb?

[seagate_surfer]

22 minutes ago, Nikolacar4 said:

Thank you for all the answers... If i have 2x160gb drives? Will raid0 have 320gb?

Yes, minus whatever space the system uses for hidden or system files, with Raid 0 you will have the capacity of both drives, the performance increase coming from it having both drives available to write to, a process known as striping.