RAID 0 Setup

[GRAYgoose124]

I have 3 drives 750GB, 650GB, and 1TB. The 750GB HDD is my boot up, I want to put it in raid with the 650GB because the 1TB would be a waste. However, I don't want to have to reinstall windows, linux, or my games. I'm hoping either I can do the raid without affecting the files and it will automatically stripe them or I can transfer all the files to the 1TB, do the raid, and transfer them back.

I'm also wondering what the performance increase might be with 2 7200RPM drives in raid at 90MB/s read/write speeds separately will be.

Thanks.

 

[Indigo]

I think you either have a misconception about RAID, or have extra drives on hand that you didn't mention. To make any RAID setup viable, you must use matched drives. Also keep in mind that RAID 0 will give performance, but if one drive dies, you lose everything.

An ideal setup for most systems today would be:

Single Boot HDD or SSD: 100GB or higher. - OR - Dual SSDs in RAID 0 (you can do it with platter based hard drives too, but the performance gains aren't really worth it on a platter based HDD these days)
Storage drive: 1TB+, most of these drives have so much speed already, it's almost too much extra work to put them into RAID.

I'm speaking from experience, I myself run RAID 0 and RAID 10 at home, and work with enterprise systems running RAID5. They all have benefits and drawbacks, but in most cases, you're almost better off just leaving the drives in single drive configuration, especially when they are different sizes.

And one other thing, adding drives to be used in a RAID array almost universally means you'll have to wipe the drive to get it to sync up with the new RAID setup.

 

[JCB1]

Hi

personally i have raided the hard-drives on my desktop system and I saw a very little speed increase, considering in Raid 0 it will only take 1 of 2 drives to fail and lose all your data I dont think its worth the risk.

But if you want to do it you can do it by following the steps below.

-Connect the 1tb hard-drive to your system
-backup all important data to a hard-drive you will not be using in the below process
-using a program such as nortan ghost clone the OS hard-drive to the 1tb drive
-unplug the 750gb drive and make sure the 1tb drive boots in to windows
-create the Raid 0 drive, then use nortan ghost again to clone the OS/Data from the 1tb drive to the raid 0 drive

let me know if u have any questions

 

[GRAYgoose124]

I think you either have a misconception about RAID, or have extra drives on hand that you didn't mention. To make any RAID setup viable, you must use matched drives. Also keep in mind that RAID 0 will give performance, but if one drive dies, you lose everything.

An ideal setup for most systems today would be:

Single Boot HDD or SSD: 100GB or higher. - OR - Dual SSDs in RAID 0 (you can do it with platter based hard drives too, but the performance gains aren't really worth it on a platter based HDD these days)
Storage drive: 1TB+, most of these drives have so much speed already, it's almost too much extra work to put them into RAID.

I'm speaking from experience, I myself run RAID 0 and RAID 10 at home, and work with enterprise systems running RAID5. They all have benefits and drawbacks, but in most cases, you're almost better off just leaving the drives in single drive configuration, especially when they are different sizes.

And one other thing, adding drives to be used in a RAID array almost universally means you'll have to wipe the drive to get it to sync up with the new RAID setup.

I thought RAID 0 could use different drives and I would lose the extra storage from the one drive. I know the likelihood of disc failure is higher and it's logical that I would lose everything, but I figured if the performance gain was enough, I would just back it up.

Hi

personally i have raided the hard-drives on my desktop system and I saw a very little speed increase, considering in Raid 0 it will only take 1 of 2 drives to fail and lose all your data I dont think its worth the risk.

But if you want to do it you can do it by following the steps below.

-Connect the 1tb hard-drive to your system
-backup all important data to a hard-drive you will not be using in the below process
-using a program such as nortan ghost clone the OS hard-drive to the 1tb drive
-unplug the 750gb drive and make sure the 1tb drive boots in to windows
-create the Raid 0 drive, then use nortan ghost again to clone the OS/Data from the 1tb drive to the raid 0 drive

let me know if u have any questions

Thanks, but I suppose I won't do it for now. I'll look into getting a 120GB SATA III SSD in the near future.

 

[Celegorm]

I agree with everything Og said expect the fact that the must be the same size drives.

I have done RAID 0 with different sized drives before, the raid is simply limited to the size of the smallest drive and the excess space can be allocated as a stand alone partition.

That might have been, and still be true on some raid controllers now, but there are some that break this rule.

 

[Chipeater]

I think you either have a misconception about RAID, or have extra drives on hand that you didn't mention. To make any RAID setup viable, you must use matched drives. [...]

Huh, so Windows desktop operating systems won't RAID identically sized partitions on two separate drives like Windows Server will?