Raid 0 Storage Space Doubles?

[switchblade]

Stupid question,
I have two 1TB hard drives set up as Striped Volumes using Windows 7.

Issue: I'm confused. After setting them up as striped volumes, I am seeing a total of 1.81TB of hard drive space for the striped volume.

Is that correct? Or should it be 937GB since the hard drives are being used like 1 hard drive to speed things up...



also, was a bit disappointed at the benchmarks. Write speed was only 160-170 MB/sec in this Raid 0 setup. Is that normal?

Drives used are:
2x WD Black 1TB 32MB cache Sata 2.

Motherboard:
ASUS Sabertooth Z77

THANKS!

 

[Sooth1]

It sounds like everything is working correctly. Raid 0 combines the volumes of the 2 drives.

 

[switchblade]

Best answer selected by switchblade.

 

[Dereck47]

Yes, that is correct.
You calculate the capacity of a RAID-0 array by taking the number of drives in the array and you multiply that by the size of the drive in the array with the smallest capacity.

So if you have a 100GB drive, a 500GB drive, and a 1TB drive, and you put them in RAID-0, the total size of your array will be 300GB.

Your benchmark results seem correct for 2 1TB HDDs in RAID-0.

 

[switchblade]

Thanks guys! Appreciate it. Sounds like it is working then. That's great! Now I have twice the space than I originally thought I would

 

[dingo07]

and if one drive fails - you have Nothing... so back up your data

 

[geofelt]

Raid-0 is misunderstood and overhyped.

It works by alternating stripes(chunks of data) written to each volume.
So, you will get about twice the amount of data on what looks like just one logical volume.

Sequential benchmarks look good because they use specially written apps that drive the units to their maximum using overlapped I/O.
Unfortunately, most user apps do not do that, so your may be disappointed if you do not see any improvement in actual performance.

On writing, it is an option to cache the writes and continue on even though the write has not been comitted to the drive. For security and recovery sake, you may or may not want to do that. Then, the writing part will not do the overlapping that the raid-0 option depends on for throughput. That results in performance of a single drive.

If you want to use raid-0 as a way to increase the single image of your "C" drive, that is a reasonable thing to do.
I have done that using smaller ssd's. (with good external backup)

A down side is that a failure of a single drive, or the motherboard raid controller will render all of your data unreadable.

My take is generally to ignore raid-0 in any normal desktop situation.

 

[switchblade]

Thanks Dingo and geofelt.

I have another internal HD for backing up all my data. The RAID 0 setup is for photo/video edits. And then I have a 3TB hard drive to back up all the work.

Copying/Pasting does seem faster and so I presume that the Raid 0 is working as intended...

Thanks again everyone for the inpouring of all the responses in such a short span of time.

I consider this topic solved and closed!

Very friendly community so far