View Single Post - Risk of RAID0

Blue|Fusion · Rated XXX

Well, before I go off to to college in August, I'm wiping and re-installing Gentoon on my desktop. Before doing so, however, I'm trying to decide if I want to use a RAID setup (for performance gains) or leave it as is with independent drives. I have 3x 160GB Saegate SATA-II drives. I really don't use that much space. I'm a performance hog, and any tweak I can get I go for it, usually despite the risks, however I don't know much about this RAID stuff.

So I have RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 on my motherboard's ICH7R controller. I've eliminated the option for RAID1 as that's not a performance gainer, just a mirrored drive. RAID5 is slow when it comes to writing, so forget that. RAID10 looks promising, but I'd need to go buy another disk for it, and although I don't use that much space, it's always nice to have it.

That leaves me with RAID0. So here's what I know. If one drive in the array dies, I'm SOL. The question I pose to you, who have done more computer hardware work than I, is how likely is it that a drive will die? I have never had a drive die on all the computers I've worked with. With that said, they've all been OEM equipped, either Dell or Crapaq, save this one, which is still realatively new.

So would it be worth the risk of going RAID0 with two disks? With three disks? What kind of performance improvements would it offer? Currently, I get between 67 and 69MB/sec read speed from each drive. Would write speeds be slower, faster, or pretty much the same?

As I've said, I never really work with RAID before, but want to get with the times and get as much speed as I can.