Raid 0: Blessing or hype?

Yoeri Lauwers writes "Tweakers.net investigates matters a bit more clearly and decides that AnandTech and Storagereview should think twice before they shout that "RAID 0 is useless on the desktop". Tweakers.net's tests illustrate the contrary"

Comments

RAID-0 is stupid.

[slamb]

Here's why no one in their right mind uses RAID-0 on data that they care about:

Unlike other RAID-levels, RAID 0 does not offer protection against drive failure in any way, so it's not considered 'true' RAID by some (the 'R' in RAID stands for 'redundant', which does not apply to RAID-0).

When you have multiple hard drives, it's more likely that one will fail than if you just have one. For the obvious statistical reasons. Plus because of heat problems in many systems.

In a non-RAID setup with multiple hard drives, when one fails, you lose whatever was on that drive.

With RAID-n (for non-zero n), you lose nothing. You say "oh well", put in a spare drive, and send the old one back for replacement. (In the other order if you're cheap.) The array rebuilds itself. Without even shutting down the machine, if you have the hot-swappable drive cages.

With RAID-0, you lose everything on all of your hard drives.

RAID-0 is considerably less reliable than a single hard drive.

Raid 0 on OS X... hardware or software.

[XavierItzmann]

Since 2002, I have been using the SIIG Raid 0 http://www.siig.com/product.asp?pid=424 card on a 1999 Sawtooth G4 with 0.48TB of internal storage. Hardware-wise, this is an OEM Acard card; also available from Sonnet and Miglia.

No disk failures to date ---I backup weekly with Apple's Backup 2.0

Here are some benchmarks that compare software RAID 0 performance (included free with OS X) vs. hardware RAID 0: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/OSX_RAIDvsIDE_Card_ RAID.html