RAID 0...does it work??

[element86]

Hi

long time away from here!

i just bought a wd mybook studio ii with raid capability.

However, reading through several websites, there doesn´t seem to be a clear answer to whether RAID 0 really gives you any noticeable gains in performance due to the use of two drives instead of one. Some say the faster speeds can only be seen on workstations vs. others say that desktops also benefit a lot from better speeds.

Does anyone have a clear answer?

Some also criticize the failure rate of RAID 0, is it really true that the failure rate doubles up? Putting things in perspective, are there a lot more chances of my data getting lost than with using just one regular drive?

any comments greatly appreciated

[Funky Dredd]

Re: RAID 0...does it work??

RAID 0 is striping without parity, any disk failure will destroy the array. Yes you will get better speeds because you are performing reads/writes in parallel but because RAID 0 does not perform error checking if there is an error it is unrecoverable (hence the greater percentage of disk failure). But the more disks you have the higher the bandwidth. I personally would never do RAID 0 without a doing a FULL backup at least once a week and INCREMENTALS daily. For me RAID 1 (2 disks) works the best, that way if I lose a disk I just replace it. At work I use RAID 1+0 on the SAN do to requirements from vendors.

[element86]

Re: RAID 0...does it work??

thanks a lot for the answer.

OK, RAID 0 doesnt do parity (error checking). But is error checking done when you use a single hard drive?

[panoulix]

Re: RAID 0...does it work??

If you have the money to go for a good RAID controller, go for a RAID5 or RAID6, to ensure you ahve maximum storage and fault tolerance...

[element86]

Re: RAID 0...does it work??

Unfortunately, I don´t....

But I want to know if a single drive does parity checking. If it doesn´t do it, then wouldn't it be the same risk as when using RAID 0?

[ganjamo]

Re: RAID 0...does it work??

Cant do Raid with a single drive, it almost doubles the reading/writing speed.
Dale una leida a esto: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

[element86]

Re: RAID 0...does it work??

yeah, but what I meant was, if a single drive doesn´t do parity checking either, there´s the same risk of the single drive producing unrecoverable errors as a RAID 0....?

(ganjamo, lo lei, gracias)

[res0nat0r]

Re: RAID 0...does it work??

^raid0 basically causes the likelyhood of an error to go higher for each new drive you add.

basically if you have two disks at raid0, then the chance of a failure is twice of a single drive.

That is, reliability (as measured by mean time to failure (MTTF) or mean time between failures (MTBF) is roughly inversely proportional to the number of members – so a set of two disks is roughly half as reliable as a single disk.

[element86]

Re: RAID 0...does it work??

cool. thanks a lot

i just got a WD My Studio II 2TB with either RAID 0 or RAID 1 option. Unfortunately, setting it to RAID 1 (the safe option) brings me down to a 1TB volume, since one disk duplicates the other one. I guess safety is a priority since its my DATA/backup drive.

I wanted to know if it was necessary to partition the volume into two, since im not only using it to backup, but also as a data drive because my system drive is full.

Does it help anything to give a separate partition to my Time Machine backup?