Best settings for RAID 0 with 2 x 500G ?

[chrbar]

Hello,

I've to build a RAID 0 (Strip size 128KB) with 2 x 500GB HDD (465.7GB).
The RAID Manager (Intel Matrix Storage) offers me to build a volume with a capacity of 931.5GB.
I needn't a large disk space, 500GB should be enough.

Does it bring something (performance or other) if I build a RAID 0 volume with a capacity of 465.7GB only (instead of 931.5GB) with 2 x 500GB HDD?

Thanks a lot,
Chris

 

[captjack5169]

When you raid 0 you strip so you are combining the drive together so 2 x 500GB = 1 TB. The speed in RAID 0 is unmatched. I have been using this config since I built my first Q6600. Its very fast and with Intel usually very reliable as long you are using high quality drives preferable WD blacks or such server class HDs. Now I am sure you know this already but here is the bad news RAID 0 offers no data redundancy. Meaning that if one drive fails all data is lost. Now they do make recover tools for lost arrays, but nothing is certain. So I add a word of caution. Store all of your mission crit data on another drive or drives, or back up regularly. The best option if you can afford it is RAID 5 or RAID 6 which requires 3 and 4 drives minimum respectively. http://www.ibeast.com/content/tools/RaidCalc/RaidCalc.asp will help you calculate raid sizes and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID will explain all the different raid types. Some might recommend a RAID 10 that is an option to.

 

[guavasauce]

i think youre talking about short stroking the disks, meaning your formating the disks to only use the outer half of the disk for performance purposes. yes, this will give a bit more, but if what youre writing isnt going to take up the whole array (alloted disk size), theres really no reason to short it, as the disk should write all info from the outside in.