Can I Handle A Bit Of Raid

[ernest1966]

i've got a motherboard (Asus P5E) that supports raid 0, 1, 5, 10 and have 2 750gb hard disks (samsung HD753LJ.

I'm going to reinstall xp soon, at the moment I have the hd's as seperate drives. The big question is shall I go raid 0 ?

I know the benefits, once nice big hd, a bit faster speed, but the pitfalls are if one disk goes down i am seriously in trubble! is it worth it ? they are fairly new disks, with about 100days use on them each.

Opinions ? Your experience?

Ta

[dave_boo]

No, it's not worth it. If you had three I'd recommend doing a RAID 5 (use it on my 15k SCSI array), but going for RAID 0 on a boot drive is like trying to steal home; a big reward for a huge risk...

[thunder30101]

I use raid 0 because i game using wd raptors and like the speed, any raid level is subject to data loss, 5 is no guarantee either. Just dont be foolish enough not to have your important files backed up to cheap dvd media and raid on.

[spacefruit]

No, it's not worth it. If you had three I'd recommend doing a RAID 5 (use it on my 15k SCSI array), but going for RAID 0 on a boot drive is like trying to steal home; a big reward for a huge risk...

In my experience raid on the boot drive didnt give me any performance increase. Much better off with a 10,000 rpm boot drive.

And yes, I have tried it more than once!

(It also can be a right pain to set up)

If you must RAID then mirror the data drive, not the system.

[ernest1966]

Thanks for the replies, very informative

[Nagatus]

Thanks for the replies, very informative

One thing to note too, that the fake raids on motherboards produce very poor performance and require special drivers from the operating system to work.

IMO definitely not worth it, if you want performance and security use 4 disks and Raid 10