RAID, STRIPE OR MIRRORED?

I'm getting a new setup very soon and have already bought 2x160gb seagate drives. Most of the data will be important and if one drive fails, i'd still want to be able to boot into windows and carry on as normal, with the remaining drive. would that be possible?

I know that Raid 0 = striping,performance.
and Raid 1=Mirroring which means data is duplicated, but means 2x160GB means 160GB usable in total.

But is their a big speed advanting on RAID 0 compared to normal?
Am I likely to loose performance on RAID 1? would it take twice as long to save a big file?

Or should I buy 2 more drives (200GB each) and raid them for performance and use that for video editing while keeping the existing drives (160 seagates)at raid 1(mirror)?

Most of my work comprises of video editing, so saving files in excess of 1GB is common as well as encoding/decoding, which normally takes 2 hours on my current old setup.

If your data is important then RAID 1 is the way to go. There is no speed penalty for using RAID 1. That is, the speed will be the same as using one drive.
RAID 0 is for speed while using all of the capacity of both drives at the expense of data safety. If you want both speed and safety consider RAID 5 which is stripping and mirroring using three drives, or RAID 0+1 using 4 drives. These last two may not be supported by your motherboard controller so if you are interested, you may need to get a RAID controller card.

Your plan of using one set of drives in RAID 0 and another in RAID 1 is a good idea.

When encoding video raid 0 is the way to go. Your plan of using 2 sets of drives should work well for you

I use RAID 0 & have so for about 4-5 years or so now...never have had an issue. *knock on wood*

but I usually back up anything important onto disks every so often so if something does happen it isn't a big deal. Also I back up stuff onto my wife laptop as well.

I've been wanting to try RAID 5 for a while just haven't gotten around to it, but I'm hoping when I do my next HD upgrade I'll be able to get 3 HD's this time.

Anyhow RAID 0 does have a nice speed advantage in games installing things (if you have fast drive) etc I love it. I wish they'd come out with more SATA DVD Drives b/c they are so much faster then normal IDE drives. I had 2 systems that where very close to identical main difference was one was an Xp 2000+ other was XP 2400+ a windows XP pro install started at the same time on both the one with RAID 0 finished several secs sooner then the one with just 1 Hard drive.

Wolverine690 said:

I've been wanting to try RAID 5 for a while just haven't gotten around to it, but I'm hoping when I do my next HD upgrade I'll be able to get 3 HD's this time.

Click to expand...

I also plan on going RAID 5 next time I upgrade HDD's (next year actually). I'll get them prior to my new build or at the same time since my current board doesn't support it. I truely can't wait. Save me time trying to backup stuff constantly or on seperate external disk which with this I would only need to do when I format which is a plus in my book.

I'll Be making myself a Nice fileserver .. soon (Hopefully).
And it will be Raid 5.
I consiered Raid 10 or 0+1 but Desided against it, loosing Half My capacity for Backup, seems too much when I can go Raid 5.

I'll be going 6 ( 7200.10, 320) Drives in Raid 5, Using the ONboard Intel Controller. The ICH8R southbridge is lovelly

Raid0 would work well for what you want. You can use an IDE drive with a ghost program to back up your windows partition and whatever other data you like, so if anything happens you can re image and lose nothing. I keep my Ghost drive disabled in device manager so that no data can be exchanged in windows that might corrupt it. It cannot be booted this way but is very safe. If you ghost, shut down and disconnect the power plug, it could be booted in emergency if necessary.