Directory  Articles Opinions/Editorials |
| Raid 0 Under Fire |
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| Thursday, 05 August 2004 | ||||
Page 1 of 2 It has come to our attention that RAID 0 has recently come under fire by some of the major PC enthusiast publications. StorageReview.com and Anandtech.com have both published articles purporting that RAID 0 is unnecessary for the desktop computer. Fastsilicon.com begs to differ, to some extent. Read on for our interpretation of RAID 0 and our humble attempt to set the record straight. 
First off, we're not going to tell you what RAID 0 is. That's right, we're going to talk about a subject and not even tell you what it is! Why you ask? Simple: if you're reading this publication chances are you already know what RAID 0 is. You see, your average reader of Fastsilion, Anandtech, StorageReview and Overclockers isn't your average computer user. They're enthusiasts. They spend many hours on their PCs, working or playing, upgrading and overclocking. They're the "gear heads" of the 21st Century, but instead of cars it's PCs. So you already know what RAID 0 is and you probably already know if you need it or not, so you probably could just skip over this article, but we would advise you read it anyway. So what'd Anandtech say about RAID 0? "...there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop." Read Anandtech's article here And StorageReview.com: "To summarize, RAID 0 offers generally minimal performance gains, significantly increased risk of data loss, and greater cost." Read StorageReview's article here Actually they're right, but let's cover their statements in detail. RAID 0 does cost more. There is the cost of a second identical drive and RAID 0 controller, although if you needed the second drive anyway for extra space then really all you're paying for is the RAID 0 controller which can be found for a rather low price. For instance, a Promise Fasttrak controller can be had for about $20.00 USD. To that end, most modern motherboards include the controller already, but they usually use the CPU for some processing power which is not recommended. RAID 0 does increase the risk of data loss because now if either of the drives fail you lose everything, however we must say drive failures are rather uncommon and can happen even if you have just one hard drive. Remember that a RAID 0 configuration doesn't necessarily mean your drives will fail so we have a disagreement with the word "significantly". If you have two separate drives not connected by RAID 0 you are just as likely to lose one of the drives as you would if they were RAID 0. Do you have two hard drives in your computer? |
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