Does RAID 0 shorten life span of drives?

[bingaloman]

So I was wondering does a RAID 0 of SSD's shorten the life span of the drives or is it the same as if you were to keep them as separate drives?

And also I hear that RAID 0 is risky because if one fails, you lose data on both, wouldn't that be the same as just having for example a 1TB HDD then?

Like for example if I have two 500gb ssds in RAID0 and it fails and I lose all data.
It would be the same as if I had one 1TB HDD and that fails, I lose all data on that as well.

So when people say you lose data on both, I always find that happens anyway even if you had 1 drive so it isn't that big of a deal I guess.

So pretty much my main question is though, if I were to have 2 drives in RAID 0 would it shorten the life span of them at all? And do they have to be the same capacity to RAID?


Thanks all!

 

[mgolus]

The nature of raid 0 is that your data is split on two two drives. This ideally allows for twice the throughput since each drive is only doing half the work. As each drive is doing half the work, there is no reason that a RAID 0 would shorten lifespans.

To your other question, yes, if one drive fails on a raid 0 array you can lose data on both. The downside to this over having a single drive is that say you have a 1 in 10 chance of a drive failing in a year (this is of course a rather high failure rate but just using for example). If you have two drives, you chances of failure and data loss become 1/10 + 1/10 or 1/5. So you basically double your chances of data loss.

 

[fricklesmn]

Hello,

RAID 0 shouldn't shorten the lifespan at all, and actually "may" extend lifespan as each drive is only reading or writing 1/2 of the data at any time. You can also use 2 different capacites, but the total will be 2x the smallest drive. Example: 250GB and 500GB hard drives - RAID 0 would create a 500GB volume and you would lose access to the extra 250GB on the 500GB drive.

 

[bingaloman]

Awesome I might just stick to the more simple route by getting a 500gb ssd since I thought you could RAID different size drives and it'll all add up but I guess that's not how it works lol

 

[USAFRet]

A 500GB SSD by itself is faster than 2 x HDD in RAID 0. And far less chance of fail.

 

[TyrOd]

With SSD's, the lack of trim and standard garbage collection algorithms does in fact shorten the lifespan of the drive partly due to accelerated and more uneven wear to the flash memory and partly due to the increased likelihood of controller instability.

The effect of RAID0 to failure rates is not simple addition. RAID0 on SSD's in particular accelerates failure rates well beyond normal operation.

It also has very little real world performance impact outside of synthetic sequential benchmarks.

RAID0 for SSD's is almost never preferable over 1 SSD of the combined size.

The implications are radically different for RAID0 on an SSD VS on hard drives in reliability and performance.