Budget Raid Array Drive Minimum Price

[Ethan Feinhaus]

So, this can also function as a thread for people who wonder about the minimum price to spend on a hard drive for a RAID 0 array.

Anyways, I was defragmenting my hard drive while trying to watch youtube videos, and my entire computer came to a crawl. When I check the resource usage, I found that my hard drive resources were completely taken up.

For a while now, ever since I built it, my computer would become slow when I was loading more than a few things at once, even though I have an i7-3770, and usage only going above 20% during stability tests or KSP. Today, the pieces fell together, and I realized that the laptop hard drive I've been using to power my system has been bottlenecking everything.

And so, with that realization, I began looking into hard drives on eBay that I can use as a second drive for RAID 0, and quickly found a used 7.5 year old hard drive for 17 dollars. All I need is 320GB on it, and it looks like it was high end, because it has a MOLEX adapter on it along with SATA, which was only available for high-end SATA hard drives. Should I go for it? If not, what's the minimum I should spend?

 

[MCServerOwner]

RAID requires two IDENTICAL drives, and is only really worthwhile if you need more speed / storage then one drive can offer. I suggest getting one drive that is faster for your system. (e.g WD Black Drive).

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, RAID is awesome (I have a massive storage server), but in your case is not the right solution.

 

[Ethan Feinhaus]

RAID requires two IDENTICAL drives, and is only really worthwhile if you need more speed / storage then one drive can offer. I suggest getting one drive that is faster for your system. (e.g WD Black Drive).

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, RAID is awesome (I have a massive storage server), but in your case is not the right solution.

I was under the impression that identical drives, while recommended for maximum efficiency and required for IDE RAID 0, are not required, and all you really need is 2 hard drives with equal space, which in this case is 320 GB.

 

[MCServerOwner]

RAID requires two IDENTICAL drives, and is only really worthwhile if you need more speed / storage then one drive can offer. I suggest getting one drive that is faster for your system. (e.g WD Black Drive).

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, RAID is awesome (I have a massive storage server), but in your case is not the right solution.

I was under the impression that identical drives, while recommended for maximum efficiency and required for IDE RAID 0, are not required, and all you really need is 2 hard drives with equal space, which in this case is 320 GB.

Sorry, I wish that was true, but since drives operate differently, the differing read/write speeds, caches and rotational speed will "tear" the RAID apart, making it useless.

EDIT: Technically, if the drives are IDENTICAL in specs (but maybe still differ manufacturer), then it will most likely work for raid 0 and 1.