# Raid 0 worth it?



## danaeckel (Jan 17, 2013)

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


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## SirDice (Jan 17, 2013)

Keep in mind that with RAID0, if one of the drives dies, you lose the whole set.


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## xibo (Jan 17, 2013)

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).


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## wblock@ (Jan 17, 2013)

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.



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.


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## danaeckel (Jan 17, 2013)

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?


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## wblock@ (Jan 17, 2013)

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.


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## kpa (Jan 17, 2013)

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.


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## throAU (Jan 23, 2013)

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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