raid worth it?

i never really understood raid, is it like having to hardrives acting as one? if so i would probably get a 10krmp for games and use the 500gig for data
 
RAID makes two identical drives appear as one, and all data in both drives is identical; it's duplicated in both drives. In case that one of the HD's get screwed up, you still have one working drive; unless both drives crap out on you the exact same moment, you've lost nothing, as all the data is safely stored on the working drive. It might be worth it if you store all your mission critical stuff on your PC, and/or if your work/living largely depends on your computer or whatever is on it. However, for an everyday user, RAID is little if no use.
 
There's different raids. Raid 0 is for performance and Raid 1 is for security. I don't really know much about all the other raids though.
 
andy_mitch92 said:
what about for gaming (raid 0 i think) does this make 2 7200rmp drives act like a faster drive or what?
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In 99.7% of cases the answer in real world performance is no. It does, however, make it twice as likely that you will lose all your data. If you do it with Caviar SE drives the chances increase exponentially.
 
hackapelite said:
RAID makes two identical drives appear as one, and all data in both drives is identical; it's duplicated in both drives. In case that one of the HD's get screwed up, you still have one working drive; unless both drives crap out on you the exact same moment, you've lost nothing, as all the data is safely stored on the working drive. It might be worth it if you store all your mission critical stuff on your PC, and/or if your work/living largely depends on your computer or whatever is on it. However, for an everyday user, RAID is little if no use.
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You are getting RAID 0 and RAID 1 mixed up.

RAID 0 is where you have multiple drives appear as one, and the data is split between all the drives. RAID 1 is when you have multiple hard drives that have the same data on both drives, which is used for redundancy.

Also, in RAID 0 if any drive in the array fails then all the data is lost.
 
Running raid 1 has saved my butt a few times. If you are like me, you have problems with hard drives failing on you. I have almost 2000 songs and other data that would be lost if it wasn't for me running raid 1. So as far as i'm concerned, it is worth it in my case...
 
I understand if one drive fails (which i've never had one do in my 6 years of computers) you loose all data. WHAT ABOUT PERFORMANCE? No one has answered that question and i mean in raid 0 for game performance.
 
andy_mitch92 said:
I understand if one drive fails (which i've never had one do in my 6 years of computers) you loose all data. WHAT ABOUT PERFORMANCE? No one has answered that question and i mean in raid 0 for game performance.
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Performance wise you do get faster throughput when copying/loading/writing large files, which makes most games and programs load a bit faster. However loading times really won't be effected enough to notice a huge difference.
 
I already did answer your question. Unless you are doing huge, sequential reads or writes (ie movie files) you're not going to notice a difference. The only difference RAID 0 users notice is in their noggins 99% of the time.
 
andy_mitch92 said:
I understand if one drive fails (which i've never had one do in my 6 years of computers) you loose all data. WHAT ABOUT PERFORMANCE? No one has answered that question and i mean in raid 0 for game performance.
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You will get no faster frames per a second and the game, well may load faster, but no you will get NO performance increase from gaming running RAID 0. Striping hard drives only really benefits pure data throughput. So, if you were like video editing a 50 gig project, yeah it would help.

Does that answer your question?
 
I've heard that 1 WD Raptor is still faster than two "regular" (7200RPM) drives in RAID 0. So maybe you should look into getting one of those.
 
vonfeldt7 said:
I've heard that 1 WD Raptor is still faster than two "regular" (7200RPM) drives in RAID 0. So maybe you should look into getting one of those.
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In terms of access times and loading of small files, then yes. However in terms of max throughput, a RAID 0 array would still beat it.
 
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