Which RAID to use? 1 or 0?

[[FETT]Cupcake]

Hey guys. Just want some opinions from you all. I'm going to be re-installing windows and setting up a raid array. I have two identical 250gig sata hdd's and I'm trying to decide between raid 1 or raid 0.

Raid 1 has the redundancy and raid 0 has the performance boost. Is he boost worth the risk with raid 0 though?

Any opinions would be greatly appeciated.

[kobalt]

The answer depends on the hardware itself as much as on the individual preference. Unless the drives are performance oriented (like WD's Raptor line) raid0 will have negligable ,if any real world performance benefit, not to mention 2x risk of data loss. Raid1 has obvious benefits, but I'm not sure I would personally give up the extra space. See if your drive is listed on storagereview.com and read up on it.

[[FETT]Cupcake]

Yeah, I'm not sure if it's worth the risk with raid0. Especially with all the moving around the rig goes through traveling to Lans. I know I would be giving up half my storage space with raid1 , but right now I'm only using 70 of my 250 gigs on my first drive. So, at the moment, I'm not even close to needing 500 gigs of storage. Would it be worth going to raid 1 for the fault protection?

I'm not really concerned with losing data though, anything that I can't replace I have on a backup hd. Mainly it would be protection from the traveling. I'd hate to drive 250 miles for a lan only to be foiled by a hdd that didn't make the trip.

[Digger[NJLP]]

I see it like this..

As far as Raid 0 is concerned I agree with kobalt, but I would be interested to see how negligable of an affect it would be, with say 7200 RPM drives. I don't put much value in the OS install or my game installs, meaning I backup the important stuff. Plus, I usually have an system image thats no older then 3 months. So I would probably try the Raid 0 for shits and giggles.

Raid1 is nice and offers great redundancy, especially if you don't backup. The HD usage is a definate issue but 250 Gigs is pretty nice and you can always add a drive thats not part of the array.

Wait can you? If you have 4 SATA ports and you are using 2 that are in a RAID configuration can you add a third and use it as a seperate drive outside the array?
I'm not sure.

And before I use any new RAID controller I load a quick install of the OS, and then pull a drive and see how hard its going to be get it up and running.

If this is your main PC I would go RAID 1 and enjoy the backup benefits, if its the gaming rig only I have a suggestion. Leave them as 2 seperate drives and write some simple copy scripts or batch files to backup your most important stuff from the main drive to the secondary. Schedual it at like 2 AM to occur and setup your PC to come on five minutes before.

You can even add the shutdown command to the script or batch file to shut the PC back down.

[[FETT]Cupcake]

Thanks guys. I'll probably just leave it as two seperate drives or do a raid 1. Digger, this is my main rig and my gaming one. I only have the one computer.

Thanks again for the advice.