*OT* - Question about RAID 0...

[Anonymous]

I have two HDD's working nicely in RAID 0...

If i defrag them, will it loose the striping? (ie move all the data to the 1 HDD?)

Daz

 

[Anonymous]

Sorry Daz, not in reply to your post, but could you shed a little light on this whole raid-0 array thing for me please. Or a good site to get info from atleast. How do i do it, why do i do it, do i need sata drives?

Cheers in advance.

 

[Roberto]

Good question, but don't know the answer

I read an interesting article the other day that showed that in strict benchmark tests, RAID 0 gave slightly better performance but in real world terms showed no real improvement over drives like the Raptor or a good Maxtor in single drive configurations.

I still think that, given that the acronym RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks and was designed for redundancy (where if one disk fails the others can replace it's lost data and then restore it when a new drive is fitted), RAID 0 was always a dodgy venture as if 1 drive goes, the whole lot goes.

Still, I can see why people do it

Rob

 

[Hellraiser]

No, as the striping is handled transparently by the raid controller - if u defrag it, the data will still be split over the 2 drives. Normally the raid controller splits it into chunks of around 64kb and each chunk gets written alternately to the drives, so no amount of defragging will get rid of that - it will just move the data toward the beginning of the 2 drives.

 

[Roberto]

Have a read of this.

Rob

 

[Anonymous]

@ Rob - I read similar reviews that said that the performance wasn't really affected, but it does come out better on PCmark on my PC.

Daz

 

[Anonymous]

@ Hellraiser - Thanks for clearing that up

Daz