Using Raid 0 for primary disk

I haven't been able to find a good answer for this, so i thought I'd ask here.

If I used two SATA 2 320 gb HDD's, RAID 0 for my system disk, would I see a worthwhile improvement in speed. I primarily use Photoshop CS5, MS Office, and the internet, no games.

the alternative is a single 320gb 7200 SATA drive.

Anyone using this setup?

You will see an increase in speed, however, RAID 0 will give you no redundancy so make sure you're not saving anything to partitions on that RAID group.

The problem with this is that you have no redundancy. A failure of either disk trashes all your data. As long as you have things backed up and there is nothing on those drives that is not replaceable, you'll see some improvement but not the doubling of disk speed that you think you should get.

It depends on where the bottleneck is. Pure theory, you double your IO/s. But you still have the same seek time and latency. For small random operations, The latency and seek take as much time as the actual read or write. So there will be little to no change. For large sequential loads, it should be about twice as fast. Unfortunately, most of what the average person does on a computer is considered smaller random operations. I would say based on experience, maybe a 25% increase in speed for real world stuff tops. As other have said, that comes with double the risk of failure and data loss. However, if it is just your OS and Apps, and not any images, then that is not too risky.

If you want to see a major increase in boot and load times, I would go with a single Solid State Drive (SSD). Those have zero latency and seek times, so you get huge increases in small IO operations over mechanical disks. Yes they are expensive. But as I mentioned above, with a RAID 0 you would not want to put any real data on there. So you don't need THAT much room for just OS and Apps.

If you are looking for something to store output video files or real time audio recording or anything that is just a big huge sequential data stream, then RAID 0 makes a big difference and can match SSD with the right drives.

Photo processing involves mostly large enough transfers that raid0 matters and you will see a speedup. The situation would be different for many small seeks as e.g. loading plugins from disk.

The fail probability of raid0 is of course twice the probability of a single drive failing, but to be honest a single drive sucks, too.

SSDs haven't been found to be more reliable overall either. So in the end the secret is in your backup system, or in building a raid that's both faster and more reliable.

I would assume that you would not store your photos on a RAID 0 due to risk or an SSD due to expense. So I don't know if that is terribly relevant.

I wasn't claiming SSD are reliable, but if you are willing to go RAID 0, then you have already decided that is not terribly important.

Yes, you will see a performance increase. As others have mentioned, RAID 0 can be dangerous. This is what everyone told me when I decided to set my laptop up 2x 320GB RAID 0. I said "yeah yeah yeah, I know what I'm doing". Fast-forward ~ 18 months and my laptop crashed, and when I wen to reboot, I get predictive failure warnings at the BIOS screen. Luckily with that warning I was able to start copying off the files, and I got about 80% of all the images I had on that volume before the one drive went and everything was lost.

I miss the performance terribly, but it was dangerous, and I won't do it again. I'm just waiting for SSD to get to a decent price/GB and I'll go that way for speed.

You can always go raid10 which gives you the raid0 speedup with no drawbacks and pretty good reliability.

The question as always is what kind of raid. The on-motherboard raid is often pretty trashy and will not have watertight recovery from disk failure for the redundant modes.

A lot of good information here, thank you!

I have 2 tb internal drives that I would store everything on, with 2 2 tb external drives as back up so I'm not worried losing anything important...just looking to speed things up a bit. I plan on getting an SSD, but I have a pc for my daughter and upgrades to my wife's laptop ahead of that!

I upgraded to 2 tb drives, so I already have the 320gb hdd's, that's what prompted this question.

75% of the time I spend on this computer is in photoshop and bridge, the rest is MS Officer and the net.

Don't bother, just put in a modern SSD, it'll be much quicker than two spinning disks in any form of raid. Spinning disks have latency, which is what slows os boot and program loads. By the same token large files are fine from a spinning disk, almost as fast as an SSD, raw files for example. That also explains why SSDs are faster for cache.

I thought it depended upon the controller. As for SSD that is for real now? I will have to check it out as my desktop is on it's way under. Amazing how bad HW quality became.

I still don't like current SSD offerings. More RAM is the cure to wait less on your disk.

Vertex 3 SSD rocks. Put your libraries on a RAID 1 pair and then back up to NAS or similar at least once a week.

uOpt wrote in post #12942169
I still don't like current SSD offerings. More RAM is the cure to wait less on your disk.

Not the same at all. How do you think things get into RAM?

S.Horton wrote in post #12942094
I thought it depended upon the controller. As for SSD that is for real now? I will have to check it out as my desktop is on it's way under. Amazing how bad HW quality became.

Nope. SSD is much much lower latency, even the older ones kick hard drives for that. They have no moving parts. Newer SSDs have much higher data transfer rates than the older ones.

uOpt wrote in post #12942169
I still don't like current SSD offerings. More RAM is the cure to wait less on your disk.

Disk caching helps, but when you're processing 20GB of files the data has to come from somewhere.