RAID 0 or no RAID

[ripken204]

would it be better to go with 2 120gig 8mb cache RAID 0 drives or 1 250 gig 16mb chache drive-all drives are 7200 rpm

only b/c i have heard many things about RAID, both good and bad and i rly dont know what i should do

 

[Nodsu]

It would be best to go with 2 120gig drives without RAID at all.
This way you will always have half your data when one of the drives happens to die.
With a single drive you put all your 250 GB of data in one basket.
With RAID0 you double your chances of losing all data due to a disk failure.

 

[tbrunt3]

Very good point most people forget ...

 

[Phantasm66]

If you are really that worried, MIRROR one drive onto the other with RAID 1. Then you will half your available disk space, but the chances of you loosing everything in one go are pretty remote, unless your machine catches on fire, or something, or some virus wipes out all data on all drives.

 

[ripken204]

does any1 know how often hard drives fail b/c out of my whole family no one has ever had a hard drive fail, unless this only rly happens with the 7200 rpm drives cus i dont think any of them have that fast of one

 

[patio]

I went almost 20 years without having a drive fail...
Then i had 2 fail within 3 months.
Develop and stick to a regular back-up regimen.

patio.

 

[Nodsu]

Hard drives don't fail "often" - they only fail once and they do it at the worst possible time

 

[Phantasm66]

I've seen many drives fail, at work and at home over the years. Maybe loose one drive of my own every 2-3 years. Often, it just starts making grinding noises one day out of the blue.

 

[ripken204]

does any1 know why they fail or is it just pretty much random or unknown?

 

[Phantasm66]

About 1 in five seem to die. But I may have just made up that statistic.

They could be made easily to never fail, but that would result in a hard drive that is just too expensive for the average consumer. So they cut corners. As standard.

 

[BringinHeat]

Hey ripken what do you want raid 0 for anyways. Just want to make sure that you dont want it for gaming thinking that you will get faster performance as this is not the case and there is virtually no performance increase.

 

[Phantasm66]

I find RAID 0 best for the multimedia server, where its good for video capture, downloading large files to (you might want to resume a download, so there is a checksum operation that runs faster with RAID 0) etc.