RAID question

[b-man1]

Get a Velociraptor or an SSD boot drive

+999999

the risk vs. performance gain just isn't enough any longer to justify RAID0. i have a 150GB raptor (non-veloci) and a 300GB veloci as my main drives. for storage, a 1.5 and 2TB drives. the larger drives equal/outperform the raptors for sustained transfers due to platter density. access times on the raptors are about 2x faster than the larger ones.

i'll definitely be going SSD when i finally decide to spend the $$$$. my system is "fast enough" for everything i do, so SSD is just a luxury to me at this point. i'd like the speeds for photoshop use, but the velociraptor does well enough for now.

the one thing holding me back is i've been playing around with USB 3.0 and can only get 100MB/s or so, but that's because my internal drives simply can't send to the USB 3 device any faster.

[Shadow250]

my board has an onboard hardware raid controller. based on your replies 2x speed is a realistic expectation then. my setup doesnt put any important data on the raid0 array so not an issue. and in case of a failure i can use acronis to rebuild it in 15 mins or less anyway. so to me its worth it (40 each for 2 wd 500 gb drives) beats the price of an ssd and a 18 sec boot isnt too shabby.

[FlyingPenguin]

PRACTICALLY NO onboard RAID controller is hardware (certainly not consumer boards - there might be some high-end workstation and server boards). They're all software. Yeah there's a chip on the mobo but it's all mostly handled by the driver.

Hardware RAID generally requires and add-on card, and usually that card has memory slots on it for caching and buffering.

However most benchmarks indicate an 80 - 91% performance improvement (not quite 2x more like 1.8x). Still pretty good, and as long as you understand the risks and keep your data on a non-RAID0 drive you're fine.

[Shadow250]

it sees the two drives as one raid disk and i loaded no drivers for it. i used an image from my single bootable drive and it worked no fuss no muss. i thought you couldnt do that with software raid. for that i thought you had to reinstall windows and give it the driver on a floppy to make it work.

[FlyingPenguin]

Actually most modern RAID hardware uses generic Windows drivers. However you're usually better off downloading the motherboard manufacturer's RAID driver for the best performance.

[Shadow250]

oh ok thanks it makes sense now.