Is it right to clone RAID0 drives to single HD?

[rcosio]

I have 2 500GB drives formatted as RAID0 that are about to die, so I bought a new 2TB seagate HD to replace them. To made the transfer clonning the RAID0 disk using seagate's disc wizard and the new drive is working OK but now I'm wondering: Was it right to clone a RAID0 drive to a single HD? Did I lose performance speed by having an HD configured this way?

 

[Multipack]

Yes you effectively halved the peformance if they are all the same speed disks, as RAID 0 uses the two disks speeds at once, but you havent compromised any data and can be safe in the knowledge that you arent going to lose any of it. It's always a good idea to backup RAID 0 arrays regularly anyway!

 

[rcosio]

Yes you effectively halved the peformance if they are all the same speed disks, as RAID 0 uses the two disks speeds at once, but you havent compromised any data and can be safe in the knowledge that you arent going to lose any of it. It's always a good idea to backup RAID 0 arrays regularly anyway!

Thanks for your response and sorry for not explaining myself correctly. What I'm wondering is: By cloning a RAID0 to single HD, did I lose performance compared to if I formatted the new HD (no RAID) and transferred the information from RAID0?. I've found that now, if I change my BIOS configuration to stop using RAID, the new drive just doesn't boot, and that makes me question about the internal format of the new drive...

 

[USAFRet]

Yes you effectively halved the peformance if they are all the same speed disks, as RAID 0 uses the two disks speeds at once, but you havent compromised any data and can be safe in the knowledge that you arent going to lose any of it. It's always a good idea to backup RAID 0 arrays regularly anyway!

Thanks for your response and sorry for not explaining myself correctly. What I'm wondering is: By cloning a RAID0 to single HD, did I lose performance compared to if I formatted the new HD (no RAID) and transferred the information from RAID0?. I've found that now, if I change my BIOS configuration to stop using RAID, the new drive just doesn't boot, and that makes me question about the internal format of the new drive...

For a successful clone operation, the very first thing you do once it is done is to disconnect the old drive. RAID or not.
Then see if it boots up properly from the new drive.

Of course, in this case, you'd probably have to adjust the BIOS, and undo the RAID settings, and then see if it boots from the new drive.

What you have now, is the new drive and BIOS thinks it is a RAID, but it isn't.

 

[Multipack]

Its probably related to AHCI/RAID boot mode compatibility. You obviously cant have RAID 0 on a single disk, but you can still boot from one disk in RAID mode. How did you create the RAID array originally? What motherboard/OS do you have?

 

[rcosio]

Its probably related to AHCI/RAID boot mode compatibility. You obviously cant have RAID 0 on a single disk, but you can still boot from one disk in RAID mode. How did you create the RAID array originally? What motherboard/OS do you have?

The motherboard is a Gigabyte z170-x gaming 3. The RAID disk was created after installing the motherboard, after changing the BIOS configuration to RAID. The RAID0 drive is now disconnected, leaving only the single HD that is working correctly. I also ran the CrystalDiskMark which reports aprox 90MB/s read, 85MB/sec write which also made me think if I should leave my system as is or change it to a non-RAID configuration. Thanks for your reply.

 

[tsnor]

Leave your MB in RAID mode if you created the drive that way. This is a config called RAID READY and many PCs ship that way. See definitions here: http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c01827420 RAID READY is different than other modes and switching can make the drive unreadable. You want raid ready or ACHI to get all of the performance out of SATA, google Native Command Queuing (NCQ).

RAID 0 does not give a performance benefit for most workloads because Windows runs at a queue depth of 1 most of the time. Queue depth 1 says there is only one IO being requested so only one of the two drives will be doing an IO. You can see your own personal queue depth in the windows resource monitor disk tab (launch resource monitor from the performance tab of task manager or google other ways). RAID 0 will help on large file movements where windows can get a lot of simultaneous IOs running. Aside: this is why 4 channel SSDs in mSATA slots run as fast as 8 channel 2.5" SSDs -- neither is using more than 1 channel most of the time.

 

[rcosio]

Thank you, glad to read I don't have to spend more time setting up my HD