Installing another hard drive and RAID 0 into my system

Going to be adding and swapping new components soon for my computer and I was looking towards adding my HDD space to my system. Was thinking of grabbing a 2TB HDD and install RAID 0 into my system, but to be honest I don't have that much experience on doing Raid 0 besides watching YouTube videos and I've only seen them install RAID 0 on a newly built system and not an old one.(Plz don't tell me to watch tutorials..) I want to install RAID 0 but I have a feeling I have to restart my entire system, which i prefer not to. If you guys have any experience about RAID 0 I'd appreciate it if you can explain to me how the process works on a system.

From my understanding of RAID 0 (which isn't much) is that it takes pieces of data and spreads it across the RAID's HDD's. This increases the read/ write speed while decreasing seek times(DUH XD), as both HDD's are reading/ writing . RAID 0 is also limited by the smallest HDD in the RAID setup, so if it has a 250GB drive in it, it would be the size of a 500gb drive. It is also more susceptible to failure, if one goes you lose all your info, as the info is spread across all the HDD's.

Since I'm not very familiar with RAID setups I cant say if you will have to reinstall windows or not.

You *do*.

>RAID 0
The most useless RAID.

If you wanted you could do 0+1 configuration, the extra space from 0 with data back up of 1. How old of a machine are we talking? Most newer mb can do this thru bio's if older your gonna need a raid card. Would recommend a network storage solution instead of putting it in the actual machine, plus you can do up to 3tb on some models with hot swappable drives.

Then what would you suggest then Tegumi? I'm open to suggestions. :)



Its not that old, it running on Vista at the moment. and I don't want network storage, would rather have Internal storage if possible.

Why not just use it for storage with no RAID setup? Also you should read the wiki article to see if a RAID setup is what you want. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

I too recommend you just get it for storage, Raid 0 basically has no benefits (grabbing an SSD is frankly more reliable), and Raid 1 is a waste of space IMO. Best Raid is RAID5, but ofc thats expensive

A RAID that actually has redundancy. Otherwise, just use your drives normally.

Mmk, I'll take your advice on that, Much appreciated Tegumi!(and everyone who commented) ^_^

Bullshit. RAID controllers on motherboards are so called "firmware" RAID, meaning you'll be using system CPU & RAM for their operation... in fact I've yet to see MOBO RAID that can do 1+0 (not to mention you need at least 4 drives for this).



RAID 0 *does* have benefits, it's only that for consumers the cons way outweigh the pros. Even in server environments where the reduced access time is worth it, it's usually combined with another RAID level to ensure better reliability.

You're right in recommending an SSD, as its effects will be a lot more noticeable and provide a more robust solution for consumers than something as fiddly as RAID.

RAID 1 is the *best* form of RAID if you're looking for *safety*. It provides a complete duplicate of all your data, and its simple approach is often better in the long run than either RAID 5 or 6-es intricate setup (...especially, since with increased drive sizes you're bound to run into problems during rebuild, hence why more and more people recommend moving to RAID 6 instead 5 in a server environment).

RAID 5 is *not* that expensive, all you need is 3 drives... (and unlike RAID 10 or 50, most MOBOs support 5) however as I wrote earlier, for a consumer it's not worth the hassle if all you want is performance. Just get an SSD then.

RAID isn't about speed (OK, RAID 0 is, but that was before SSDs... and the 0 refers to how many files you're gonna recover if *any* of your drives went belly up. In fact using 0 means you *double* the chance of failure), it's about redundancy to protect against hardware failure.

(It's *not* a backup. In fact RAID doesn't protect against the most common form of data loss - human or software error, i.e. data accidentally deleted).



They might use JBOD (just bunch of disks), though once again I see little reason for this in consumer use. Normally this is done to show all your drives as a continuous volume toward the OS.

The downside? Once again, you're relying on a firmware that can be the source of lots of pain... and will likely make moving your drives for a different computer (say, data recovery!) a *pain*.

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Windows can also do software RAID.

Windows 2000 and XP could do JBOD (spanned), RAID 0 (striped), while in Vista & Windows 7 you could use RAID 1 (mirrored) volumes too, a feature so far only available in the server OSes (Win2k server, Win2k3, etc). RAID 5 was supposed to be available too, except licensing issues reared their ugly head.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raid-additional-hardware,363.html

Using some ugly hacks, you can use RAID 1 or even 5 under XP, and probably something similar is available for Vista & 7 to enable RAID 5. This is possible, since one can *create* mirrored and "RAID 5" volumes on a remote host when using a server OS. (So XP, Vista and 7 already support these volumes, they just don't allow you to create them due licensing issues).

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windowsxp-make-raid-5-happen,925.html

The upside? MS's solution is actually a more robust piece of software engineering than what usually goes into firmware RAID drivers.

The downside? You're gonna have to format your drives as use them as a dynamic volume. No non MS OS can handle these, and you won't be able to use a whole bunch of 3rd party software either.

...and once again you'd introduce a bunch of complexity into your system. For consumer use, this is usually not worth it.

Never knew raid was like that thanks :) will probably just go with another hard drive and just install it normally with no raid. (taking tegumi advice)