RAID 0 Performance

[DeltaActual]

So I'm new here and this is my first post so I apologize in advance for my noobness.

 

I currently have 2 1 TB  WD Blue HDDs acting as a spanned volume in my pc, but I am curious as to the performance gain that I could get if I were to have them run in raid 0. Additionally, would I gain more performance per drive added to the raid or does it not scale that way? I will be getting a 3rd WD Blue soon so I would just like to know if running the drives in a raid 0 config would be worth it or just expand the volume like I have already done. Thanks in advance.

[emosun]

 

the performance gain isn't worth the risk , two hdds will still be slower than a low budget ssd.

[leadeater]

Running a span or RAID 0 is actually rather risky as it only takes 1 disk to fail and all data is lost. Yes you will get better performance with RAID 0 than a span but the performance gain is not actually that much.

 

It would be better to get an SSD for your OS and a few important programs/games you want to be much faster and a secondary single much larger HDD or two in RAID 1.

[Oshino Shinobu]

After two drives, you tend to see very little in terms of performance improvements with RAID 0. It's generally not something I'd advise doing unless you really don't care about the data being stored o the drives. 

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

It would be better to get an SSD for your OS and a few important programs/games you want to be much faster and a secondary single much larger HDD or two in RAID 1.

I'd say go for a backup before RAID 1, if it's not there already. Majority of home PCs don't really need redundancy and a backup protects against much more than RAID. 

[DeltaActual]

Thanks for the info! I have my OS on my M.2 and my main games and files on the M.2 and an SSD. I only have the HDDs for the rest of my steam library and the raw footage from game recordings. I'll just continue to expand the volume since the data isn't that vital and the drives are only a few months old.

[leadeater]

19 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

I'd say go for a backup before RAID 1, if it's not there already. Majority of home PCs don't really need redundancy and a backup protects against much more than RAID. 

I just turn on previous versions which gets me most of what an external backup device gives other than the physical separation and joint failure protection, not something I view all that important for my home PC though and likelihood of needing it is low. Nice thing about previous versions is data doesn't need to be copied off the system but I still get restore points of data. 

 

Previous versions + RAID 1 is a really nice setup which doesn't rely on you remembering to run a backup or plug in an external HDD or buy a NAS, it's a good mid step between having none and a NAS that I personally like better than the external HDD approach because I always forget to plug the damn thing in lol.