Actually, RAID0 does have its uses.

We use RAID0 for the data on our web servers.. html files, images, videos.

The o/s is on a single drive, the data is on a RAID0 with three drives. Huge
performance gain.

But, also... we have over 30 servers in the server farm. So if a hard drive
in the RAID0 crashes, the other 29 servers can take up the slack without any
issues. I lose on average about two to three hard drives a year among the 30
servers.

Now, if you have one database server and you use RAID0.....................

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 9:57 AM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: Re: SATA RAID Performance

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:09 PM, Phillip Partipilo <[email protected]> wrote:
> Those are almost always software RAIDs, so your CPU would be doing all of
> the parity processing on RAID5 so performance there would quite suck.

  It depends on the workload (and just how crappy the fake RAID
implementation is).  A lot of systems spend most of their CPU time
idle, so using that for RAID doesn't hurt you much.

  Over in the land of Linux, for example, OS software RAID performance
often blows even the best dedicated RAID hardware out of the water.
(It helps that Linux's RAID implementation doesn't suck anywhere near
as much as Windows' does.)  I wouldn't do it on a web transaction
host, SQL box, etc., but if it's a file server, static web content
server, proxy cache, etc., sure.

  But given that the OP later states it's a gaming box, yah, I agree:
Steer clear from fake/host/software RAID.

>There appears very low overhead striping in a RAID0 ...

  At the cost of doubling your chance of system failure due to disk trouble.

  These days, I wouldn't touch RAID 0 with a ten foot cattle prod.

> when you created a RAID1 set, it would read the data in
> a striping pattern, essentially doubling read performance.

  Any decent RAID 1 implementation will do that.  See above about
implementations that suck.  ;-)

-- Ben

~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
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