Raid 0 worth it?

D

danaeckel

Greetings,
About a year ago I built a home server and used FreeBSD 9.0. It was slow for network file transfers since I had old equipment. Equipment would be AMD 2700+, 100Mbps network, and IDE 133 HDD. I am about to build a new server and plan to use an ivy bridge i3, gigabit, and 2TB HDD. My question is would I benefit from a pair of 2TBs and use Raid 0, or just a single drive. I'm not worried about mirroring since I plan to use an external USB 3.0 for backups.

Thank You!
Dana
 
Keep in mind that with RAID0, if one of the drives dies, you lose the whole set.
 
How do you access your data, and how many people access it?

A single modern disk can read/write about 150MBytes/sec of data sequencially, which is more than a 1GBaseT NIC can handle. If you do insequencial access or have many users accessing it (or a you are running torrent with 100+ connections) that "speed" will go down considerably since the disk needs to spin to the next block to read/write. RAID-0 won't help you here though, unless it's RAID-10.

For a home server used to store multimedia contents, use a single disk or raid-5 for safety/speed (raid-5 also excels at sequencial access speed but is poor at insequencial one).
 
danaeckel said:
Greetings,
About a year ago I built a home server and used FreeBSD 9.0. It was slow for network file transfers since I had old equipment. Equipment would be AMD 2700+, 100Mbps network, and IDE 133 HDD. I am about to build a new server and plan to use an ivy bridge i3, gigabit, and 2TB HDD. My question is would I benefit from a pair of 2TBs and use Raid 0, or just a single drive. I'm not worried about mirroring since I plan to use an external USB 3.0 for backups.
Click to expand...

A single drive would be twice as reliable as a RAID0. But many current drives are not overly reliable. A mirror would read faster than a single drive, but not write faster. And you only get one drive's worth of space, but it's safer than a single drive.

Remember that mirrors are not backup, they are just protection against drive failure.
 
Ok, well, the mobo and HDD's are SATA 3 drives, and about 4 people will be on it. Home folders will be on there, lots of media files, movies, music, photos. Would I notice a speed gain with raid 0 with a setup like this?
 
A perceptible speed gain? Maybe. I confess I've never been in a situation where RAID0 looked like a viable option. You're already considering two drives. Why not get them, set them up in RAID0, benchmark (benchmarks/bonnie++), then reconfigure them into a mirror (gmirror(8)) and benchmark again. That would give real numbers. At worst, you end up a safe mirror that is faster and more reliable than a single drive. And the WD Red 2T drives have been around the $110 mark lately.
 
RAID0 was widely used in video editing at the time when a fast scrap disk wasn't possible by other means. Now with the HD speeds much faster and SSDs available there's no real use for just RAID0 alone.
 
Depends what your users are doing.

I run 15 user offices off a single RAID1 mirror and have no complaints - and that's with 2 VMs on it under ESXi - a file/print box and an SQL server.


IMHO - if you need the speed of RAID 0 (i.e., time is money), you should be budgeting for reliability as well (as downtime is also money).

RAID0 today is of very limited use - scratch space only, imho - and you're probably better off just using an SSD for that.
 
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