is it worth going to raid 0?

Question

i have hp desktop pc with a 500gb hdd and i was going to replace it with a 1tb hdd but would it be better to buy another 500gb hdd and put it in the other bay to create a 1000gb raid 0 'stripe'

Answer 1

I prefer RAID 1 because it's easier to recover. My husband used to use RAID 5. He added a new drive to his array and set it to migrate the data. Windows put the computer to sleep in the middle of the migration. It took several months of intensive work with recovery software (which cost several hundred dollars) as well as investing in several TB of drives to use as scratch space before he was able to recover around 80% of his data. The rest is just gone. He's since switched to RAID 1. When striping goes bad, you're hosed.

Answer 2

the keys to performance would be: 1) the drives are a 'matched' set, in terms of RPM and cache size, as they will stay in sync. faster platter speeds cost more and make more heat though. 2) you use a lot of applications that are disk intensive, as disk access speed would improve about 30% in most cases, and the lower prices of 500gb drives would make it worthwhile upgrade. 3) read up on the controller in your particular motherboard, as some do raid better than others in terms of throughput.



Of course, the trade off is speed for recoverability in the event of a hard drive failure, but those are relatively rare if you know what you're doing and keep your case cool. Keep your old HD handy for backup. Also the OS has a bearing on how disks are used, so your mileage may vary based on things like drivers, etc.

Answer 3

There are pros and cons to creating an array like that.



Pro: Because you have two drives and the read/writes can be spread over the two drives, you will see a performance increase in disk read/write functions.



Con: Data security. If EITHER drive fails, you will lose the data on BOTH drives.





If you put more stock in data security without much of a need for read/write speeds, buy a single drive. If you want a performance boost, go with the RAID. It's really your choice!