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Raid 0: Blessing or hype?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the more-of-the-subject dept.

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"

7 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I use RAID 0... by isorox · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sure, lose one drive and you lose everything. There are better ways to store everything on one "drive letter"

  2. If you haven't tried it, don't knock it. by cwm9 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A common misconception is that striping beyond 2 drives is "worthless." That simply isn't true: remember that the inside of the drives, close to the spindles, has a transfer rate that is nearly half what it is on the outside cylindars. By striping 4 drives togeather, about half the bandiwdth is wasted near the FRONT of the drive, but near the tail, it's almost all being used. The effect is that the drive feels uniformly quick no matter what part of the drive you are reading from!

    I personally jumped from a single drive to a 4-drive SATA raid-0 system, composed of 120GB drives from two different manufacturers.

    The system screams.

    I can't tell you how nice it is to have my computer boot in half the time... how your system feels like you always wished it would feel. You can add all the memory you want, all the processing power you want, but if you can't feed the computer, it's all pointless.

    The only thing I wish now was that my system had a faster and/or wider bus that would allow me to take advantage of all the currently unused bandwidth available from the four drives.

  3. Methodology by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Tweakers.net conludes

    And it's not just our benchmark results that support this view: the majority of Tweakers.net readers who at one time or another tried striping, feel that the overall responsiveness of their computer improved when employing RAID 0.


    Of course they do. After all, they've spent extra money and time pimping out their rigs.
    1. Re:Methodology by Slack3r78 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, I did an absolute double take when I got to that part. They spend an entire article bashing the two of the most methodical sites out there on methodilogy and then try to use a completely unscientific poll as backing evidence to their claim? Let alone a poll that's naturally pre-biased to a particular conclusion. It really puts the validity of the rest of the article into question. If that's acceptable evidence, what other shoddy methods are acceptable to them?

      If you've spent the extra money on RAID 0, you're going to believe there's a difference going in. Hell, I've done it myself - I have 2 machines with RAID 0 setups, but that's because they're commonly used for working with multi-gig sized files in photoshop - IE: I actually need the strong sequential speed.

      For normal desktop setups, I'd absolutely agree with AT and SR on this one. Unless you're doing massive amounts of large sequential reads/writes, you're just not going to see a difference in speed worth the cost of another drive and the major increase in potential failure and data loss. Remember, by adding that second drive, your chance of failure goes up *exponentially* which is something a lot of hardcore "tweakers" forget.

  4. *shudder* by LordLucless · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just the thought of using RAID-0 makes me shiver. The only people who should use this are people who keep good backups, and like using them. The speed gains are of little use for individuals, and for the professionals or corporations that might actually want the speed-up, the chances of data-loss are too high.

    That's not to say there isn't a purpose for RAID-0 - it teaches people how useful backups are. The hard way.

    --
    Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
  5. Re:I support desktop RAID 0 boxes... by koali · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nope, reliability goes down.

    Let's suppose that both the 80Gb and the 160Gb drives have a possibility of failing in a month of 10%.

    Now, with the 1x160Gb you have 10% of having a failure this month, obviously. What's the probability for both drives?

    Well, since each one won't fail 90% of the time, the probabilities of both not failing is 81% (0.9*0.9). The rest, 19% is the possibility that one or both fail, therefore, instead of a 10% failure rate, you get 19%... nearly twice!

  6. Article Summary by Jay+L · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1. Anandtech and StorageReview benchmarked RAID 0 and found that, for desktop applications, RAID 0 is slightly slower than a single drive, because the things that RAID 0 is good at are not the things that desktops need.

    2. So we changed the benchmarks to really need the things that RAID 0 is good at.

    3. And now, RAID 0 improves things!

    4. Therefore, the benchmarks in #1 were wrong.

    Summary of the summary:

    I'm looking for my keys under this lamppost because the light is better here.