Raid 0 or Not?

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I guess I am lucky because I have never had a drive fail on my home computer since the 80s growing up. I backup my important files to an online service and backup all my files to a second drive so losing them isn't too much of a worry. I have an nVidia 780i MB and am considering RAID 0 for my boot drive. I play a lot of games and am lured to more speed. I have two 500 GB WD AAKS drives and a 1TB RE3 drive for backup. Would putting the two 500 Gig drives in RAID mean restoring to them or would my data remain? Secondly what is the best backup software for a RAID boot drive? I use Acronis True Image currently.
 
http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html is pretty good advice concening all available RAID setups. If a drive fails in raid 0, you lose it all, and have to replace one drive then restore from backup. Are you thinking of raid 1? You are not going to see any difference for any software with respect to a Raid array - they all appear to the OS as a single drive. Having said that, they do perform differently. This is all very clearly explained in the link I give, and Raid 0 will give little or anything better unless it is a hardware array.

By the way, watch those online backup systems, Yahoo, I see, is simply stopping their service at very little notice.
 
Raid is a technology for servers, not home users.

Here's some info

Raid-0 is a nightmare for backup considerations and most users endup with a
total reinstall even for simple issues when a restore would have been sufficient
without Raid-0.

STRONGLY advise against Raid-0 for home users.
 
Well I think that since so many people are saying RAID 0 isn't worth the hassles it brings I am going to buy faster drives and run them in a non-RAID setup. I had wanted to try a Velociraptor but they are too small. I was considering buying 3 of the 300GB ones and trying to span them so that they are treated as a single drive giving me enough room for a my main drive.

Thanks,
Keith
 
You might consider the DYNAMIC DISK option; it will 'span' multiple disks but not
'stripe' them.

The DD option causes (say three drives) to be seen as one and when one hd fills
the next one begins to take data.
 
Raid 0 benefits performance and not redundancy. Raid 1 provides a real-time backup solution but is overkill for your average home computer. Neither is very practical for home use. But if you insist on raid and can afford it get raid 10 it is a combination of raid 0 and raid 1. I would get a fast drive and do periodic incremental/differential backups to a second drive (external). Acronis is good for this. Heres more info on raid from wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks
 
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