Laptops With Raid Strip

[Digitalbanana]

Not an expert on RAID, but this laptop I've ordered comes with two 500GB hard discs set up as a single 1TB with a RAID strip.

Is this better than two drives? Think I'd rather have my data separate to o/s (Win 7 Home Premium in this case), so how does RAID help? I wanted to take one disk out and put a smaller SSD drive as the o/s. Thoughts? Any experiences welcomed.

[spacemunk]

Raid 0+1 is just better performance with 1TB of space usage and if it crashes there goes everything.

Raid 5 is a array which you wouldnt want to even be using on a laptop.

Conclusion drop 1 drive and put in a ssd.

[thaimite]

I doubt this a Raid 0+1 configuration is used as this requires 3 disks. (see here)

If set up as a RAID 0 giving you 1TB from 2 of 500GB drives, then this is very bad because if either drive fails it will result in ALL your data being lost. Obviously if you have 2 drives the theoretical chance of one failing is double.

If the drives are set up with full mirroring (RAID 1) then you have full redundancy but only 500GB of space. I would not recommend that either, as think this amount of redundancy is excessive for a lapop., and you would be much better off with an external drive that you back up to as required, which would also prevent a loss of data should the laptop be stolen (assuming your backup drive is not in the same bag

[Digitalbanana]

Thanks guys, so RAID seems to get a thumbs down. I'll see what I can do to get out of using RAID when the laptop turns up.

[thaimite]

Thanks guys, so RAID seems to get a thumbs down. I'll see what I can do to get out of using RAID when the laptop turns up.

You should be able to set it up as 2 separate drives. One with the OS and programs and the other with data, or similar.

Don't get me wrong, under the right circumstances RAID is very good and stops you loosing data or having downtime if a drive fails. But that requires 3 or more drives and a higher level of RAID.

For projects I work on I would usually specifiy RAID 5 or preferably 6 which means critical systems can keep working without loss of data if a drive fails (2 drives in the case of RAID 6), but this is for high avalability systems which also have full redundancy in a 2nd location as well.

[rakman]

Thanks guys, so RAID seems to get a thumbs down. I'll see what I can do to get out of using RAID when the laptop turns up.

I wouldn't use raid 0 for anything critical. Raid 1 is good to avoid data loss if 1 drive dies (highly likely). Raid 1 will also give you faster reads.

If you only need just 500GB (!!!), then consider the protection benefit, but don't forget to backup regularly. You can't recover data if you don't have it backed up.

The other way to use it is dual boot, or extra data storage. Extra drive letters.

Lots more flexibility with 2 drives, IMHO.

[nikster]

RAID 0 in a laptop - not so good.

As others have mentioned if either drive dies, you lose all data. But, you should have a backup anyway, RAID 0 or not.

Also, two drives spinning continuously will drop your battery life. Whereas, if you use one for the OS and one for data, the less frequently used one can enter sleep mode.

I have an SSD + HD in my laptop, highly recommended. In my experiments, when I unmount the (data) HDD I get about 30 - 50 minutes more battery life.