Question about Raid 0 build from Dell (from Dell Website) (screenshot) (help)

[saeroner]

Hi,

I'm confused about this (see screenshot below).

I'm trying to order a machine for video editing. On the raid 0 options, i choose the 2.5 SATA/SSD boot + 3.5 SATA HD. What exactally does this mean?

Does that mean there will be a SSD plus 2 SATA drives for the raid 0? So i would add the hard drives in the options below?

I guess you choose the config here and then select the dives below that? Sorry this is probably a dumb question

 

[Jeff Kaos]

It means that your "C" drive will be the SSD drive and your "D" drive will be the 2 HDD's in the RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 means that both HDD's will act like one large drive and any data saved to the RAID 0 setup will be split evenly between the 2. Wikipedia has a really easy to understand explanation of different RAID setups. From the pictures it looks like you'll be getting one SSD drive and 1 HDD and unless something has changed in the 3 or 4 years since I built my last RAID system you can't setup a RAID between 2 different size drives. And you absolutely cannot have a RAID between an SSD and an HDD..

 

[tsnor]

You are looking at an SSD boot drive for system and applications plus a spinning drive to hold large things like movies and games that do not fit on the SSD. A very reasonable configuration.

You have selected RAID 0. This is not right. Check the NO RAID instead.

You would use RAID 0 if you had two drives exactly the same and wanted to spread the data so that (roughly) every other record is on a different drive. For some workloads this gives better performance at the cost of losing ALL your data if either one of the drives fails. You should not configure RAID zero across an SSD and a spinning drive, you might as well not have the SSD.

The final two screen shots are confusing. The first hard drive is the 360GB SSD boot drive. The second hard drive is not selected which seems to conflict with the first screen shot which is clearly showing a 2.5inch SSD and a 3.5inch spinning drive.

I suggest you call Dell Sales Support and tell them what you will use your PC for and have them recommend a disk configuration.

 

[RealBeast]

You are correct that the Dell page is somewhat confusing.

What is the model number of the Dell that you are configuring?

My take is that you get an Intel 360GB SSD (probably the model 530). The rest is a bit confusing regarding the HDD.

You no NOT want to run any of your drives as RAID 0 arrays. If one drive goes out in RAID 0 you lose all of your data and there is really minimal upside from using it in the first place.

You cannot RAID0 an SSD and HDD using motherboard level hardware, you can use up to 64GB of SSD as cache for the HDD using Intel RST but that is a waste of SSD space as it does not really improve storage performance.

 

[BadAsAl]

The advantage doing it this way is to improve performance since the PC can read data from both RAID'd drives simultaneously. The downside is if one RAID drive fails, the data from both drives is basically lost. If you go this route, make sure you have a good backup plan. If you go RAID 1 the data is mirrored across both drives, which is not a backup plan but can keep you running should one of the drives fail. You still need a good offsite backup system in place regardless of which way you go.