raid 0 limitations?

[mikekazik1]

During the past week, I did quite a bit of research on raid 0. However, I couldn't find a lot of info about it's limitations. At this point in time, what is the max number of hard drives that you can hook up in raid 0? Is there a limit to how much disk space you can have?

 

[rozar]

The major limitation of RAID 0 in terms of RAID and compared to other levels is that RAID 0 does not offer any redundancy and will increase your access time. There are also some situations where RAID 0 really makes a difference and other situations where RAID 0 not only does not help but can make you system worse.

As to how many drives can be added to a RAID 0, that is determined by your controller and your budget and maybe your chassis. As far as disk space, that is limited by your controller in some situations, partition type, and to some extent your file system. The one that seems to be most relevent these days is; a MBR partition in a 32 bit OS can be 2048GB or smaller. There is a GUID partition in 2003 server and VIsta which can be much bigger. There is a limit to a GUID partition and the NTFS file system but you are not likely to have this as your problem as they are really large by todays standards.

Just be careful with RAID 0, if you put a ton of drives in a RAID 0 array and 1 goes bad you lose everything.

 

[chunkymonster]

In short, you can hook up any number of drives in RAID0 and disk space is limited by the number of drives in the RAID0 array.

Here's a link to a wiki about RAID0, give it a read.

And, here's a great article on RAID0 scaling with 2-8 drives.

Both of these should answer most of your questions.

 

[malveaux]

During the past week, I did quite a bit of research on raid 0. However, I couldn't find a lot of info about it's limitations. At this point in time, what is the max number of hard drives that you can hook up in raid 0? Is there a limit to how much disk space you can have?

With RAID0 there's no limit to the number of drives, nor storage capacity.

However...

This is controlled by a RAID controller, and it is limited on the lower end (ie, consumer grade) and far great on the industrial grade equipment. The little RAID controllers you buy for home are simply not going to allow you to put an unlimited number of drives and it will bottleneck out eventually in data transfer speeds because RAID0, the more drives you add, it's literally linear how much data movement it increases by and your system eventually just can't keep up with it. But this is on the extreme end of things, like 8+ drives for the typical at-home enthusiast who just wants a monster array--completely unrealistic for day to day computing for a specific reason which I'll touch on.

The more drives you add to the array, the SLOWER your access time gets. TH did a test on 8 drives in RAID0, the access time was over 30ms. You will notice this in your day to day use. That's a massive number compared to the typical access times of single drives or even just RAID0 with 2 drives on the array. Also, of course, the more drives you have, the more probability you have of it failing unless you have redundancy (ie, RAID1 or RAID5, etc, as well). Large raid arrays are not good for average use and gaming. They're terrible in fact. They're only useful for massive server farms. Even then, you want parity or it all comes crashing down.

If this is RAID0 at home, get 2 or 3 drives, 4 at best, and leave it at that. Your access time will be something you might want to consider if you do a lot of tasking. Your write speeds will be insane. But, there's more to it than that.

Very best,

 

[Syntax Error]

Yikes, I wouldn't trust RAID0 for anything past two drives, and that's even with the data being stored on it (such as an OS, nothing mission-critical or anything).

Just remember the statistical odds of data loss in a RAID 0 array grows exponentially depending on the failure rates of the drives used in an array and the number of drives involved.

So don't expect an eight-disk RAID 0 array to keep your data for any long periods of time!