Raid 0 WD Caviar Blue + WD Caviar Green

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RightHereBro

RightHereBro

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Dec 13, 2015
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Hello,
I have one WD Caviar Blue 1TB and one WD Caviar Green 1TB, both drives have the same cache but the green is slower.
Can i make a Raid 0 with those drives?
If yes, what problems should i expect and what performance?
Also how possible is this kind of raid to fail?
I am talking for software Raid because my motherboard don't support hardware raid and i don't want to buy a controller.
Finally, are their any problems with the drives like shortening their life time when they are being used in raid configuration??
The drives Read Write Sequential Speed are as follow: Blue= 180 MB/s, Green= 95 MB/s(Measured with CrystalDiskMark 5)
 
Solution
nukemaster
Worst case you will have inconsistent performance.

One downside to RAID0 is that it does NOT make seek times faster(may slightly slow it in some cases).

having a slow 5400 rpm drive may leave the faster 7200 rpm drive waiting. I multiple WDC Blacks in RAID0 and had un-even performance until I noticed that one of them had AAM(makes the drive more quiet at the expense of access times) on. Once I turned that off(lowest setting it had), all was good.

You can certainly try it, but outside of requiring faster sequential read/writes, It may not be the best idea.
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I wouldn't even try. the green drives are meant for low power environments and will be constantly spinning down to save power. which will take longer for the drive to be ready when needed.
iirc the greens have a slower rotational speed too.
 
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Worst case you will have inconsistent performance.

One downside to RAID0 is that it does NOT make seek times faster(may slightly slow it in some cases).

having a slow 5400 rpm drive may leave the faster 7200 rpm drive waiting. I multiple WDC Blacks in RAID0 and had un-even performance until I noticed that one of them had AAM(makes the drive more quiet at the expense of access times) on. Once I turned that off(lowest setting it had), all was good.

You can certainly try it, but outside of requiring faster sequential read/writes, It may not be the best idea.
 
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Solution
almost 2 x the sequential read/write speeds of the slowest drive. Since random speeds are not improved(and maybe made slower by the green in the mix since the blue will be waiting for it to finish before they can do the next stripe) in many cases it is not a great idea.

If you just need more space instead of speed, mount one drive into a folder on the other :)
 
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I agree. (update: with first comment to NOT use RAID0)

My advice is plan to upgrade to an SSD for Windows + apps (possibly a few games) and keep the hard drives for larger files, games (depending on how many you have), backup OS image etc.

A 250GB SSD is pretty cheap now, though again you'd have to PLAN (depending on how much space you've used on the main OS).

One example:

1. Buy 250GB Samsung 850 EVO or similar
2. physically install, boot to SSD, test drive to see if it works

3. MOVE enough data from OS HDD to the other HDD to fit C-drive onto SSD (i.e. 200GB or less)
4. CLONE HDD to SSD

5. Boot to SSD (may need to change BIOS boot order, "DEL" on bootup, to make sure the SSD is the boot drive).

Or...
Plan for a reinstall (or upgrade) to Windows 10 on the SSD directly.
 
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You can expect no noticeable performance games from RAID in a typical desktop / gaming environment. Workstation apps yes, video editing, yes.... benchmarks yes. Office apps, gaming, browsing, no.

The post below is at least 10 years old and nothing has changed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_0#RAID_0

RAID 0 is useful for setups such as large read-only NFS servers where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.

RAID 0 is also used in some gaming systems where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important. However, real-world tests with games have shown that RAID-0 performance gains are minimal, although some desktop applications will benefit.[1][2]

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2101
"We were hoping to see some sort of performance increase in the game loading tests, but the RAID array didn't give us that. While the scores put the RAID-0 array slightly slower than the single drive Raptor II, you should also remember that these scores are timed by hand and thus, we're dealing within normal variations in the "benchmark".

Our Unreal Tournament 2004 test uses the full version of the game and leaves all settings on defaults. After launching the game, we select Instant Action from the menu, choose Assault mode and select the Robot Factory level. The stop watch timer is started right after the Play button is clicked, and stopped when the loading screen disappears. The test is repeated three times with the final score reported being an average of the three. In order to avoid the effects of caching, we reboot between runs. All times are reported in seconds; lower scores, obviously, being better. In Unreal Tournament, we're left with exactly no performance improvement, thanks to RAID-0

If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth."

http://www.techwarelabs.com/articles/hardware/raid-and-gaming/index_6.shtml
".....we did not see an increase in FPS through its use. Load times for levels and games was significantly reduced utilizing the Raid controller and array. As we stated we do not expect that the majority of gamers are willing to purchase greater than 4 drives and a controller for this kind of setup. While onboard Raid is an option available to many users you should be aware that using onboard Raid will mean the consumption of CPU time for this task and thus a reduction in performance that may actually lead to worse FPS. An add-on controller will always be the best option until they integrate discreet Raid controllers with their own memory into consumer level motherboards."

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1001325
"However, many have tried to justify/overlook those shortcomings by simply saying "It's faster." Anyone who does this is wrong, wasting their money, and buying into hype. Nothing more."

http://jeff-sue.suite101.com/how-raid-storage-improves-performance-a101975
"The real-world performance benefits possible in a single-user PC situation is not a given for most people, because the benefits rely on multiple independent, simultaneous requests. One person running most desktop applications may not see a big payback in performance because they are not written to do asynchronous I/O to disks. Understanding this can help avoid disappointment."

http://www.scs-myung.com/v2/index. [...] om_content
"What about performance? This, we suspect, is the primary reason why so many users doggedly pursue the RAID 0 "holy grail." This inevitably leads to dissapointment by those that notice little or no performance gain.....As stated above, first person shooters rarely benefit from RAID 0.__ Frame rates will almost certainly not improve, as they are determined by your video card and processor above all else. In fact, theoretically your FPS frame rate may decrease, since many low-cost RAID controllers (anything made by Highpoint at the tiem of this writing, and most cards from Promise) implement RAID in software, so the process of splitting and combining data across your drives is done by your CPU, which could better be utilized by your game. That said, the CPU overhead of RAID0 is minimal on high-performance processors."

Even the HD manufacturers limit RAID's advantages to very specific applications and non of them involves gaming:
Click to expand...

If you want to increase storage subsystem performance in gaming, install an SSD for a 50% increase over a WD Black... which is much much faster than a WD Blue of Green

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-charts-2013/-17-PCMark-7-Gaming,2915.html

Seagate Desktop SSHD - 9.76 MB/s
Western Digital Caviar Black WD2001FASS - 6.34 MB/s
Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS - 5.14 MB/s
Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS* - 4.01 MB/s

The newer blues are faster than the one above, somewhere between the Green and Black above it
 
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None Because the green will continually make the blue wait. You may even get data corruption due to misses writes or states. If you are looking for a speed increase you need 2 blues at least. The issue with the green is it will continually spin down if its not being accessed.
If this is for gaming increase the best scenario would be to get a ssd. Raid wuill make some apps faster but usually has no gaiming effect.
The only thing raid 0 would improve using 2 blues would possibly be load times or save times. Not frame rates.
 
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Then I'd suggest using an SSD for the games that benefit the most (like Skyrim due to constant loading or a few games with really high initial load times) because MOST games don't benefit much beyond the initial loading.

(Usually about 2X the savings, rarely more than 3X in my experience. Doesn't help much if videos are non-skippable though you can often bypass those. More tips here: http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Category:Windows )

With STEAM you can MOVE games between an HDD and SSD like THIS:

1. Install SSD
2. Create new Steam folder (in Steam settings...library..)

3. Backup game
4. Delete game

5. Restore backup (but now choose the new folder on the SSD instead)

Other:
Depending on how much space you need, you could also just CLONE the existing C-drive but it's hard to give exact advice without details.
 
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http://pcpartpicker.com/part/samsung-internal-hard-drive-mz75e500bam

$150 for a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO.

OR...
If budget is tight, get a $65, 240GB SSD from Sandisk or similar:
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/sandisk-internal-hard-drive-sdssda240gg25

Then...
1. Plan to put OS, or just use as secondary drive
2. Install SSD software and apply Overprovisioning (Samsung Magician is pretty straightforward) and other options
3. MOVE games over as described in my comment above (for games that benefit the MOST as I said like Skyrim with constant loading)
etc.

*You can install a LOT of games on a 240GB SSD. Even if we assume 200GB and an average of say 10GB then that's 20 games. Some games are huge so it will vary.

**If you CLONE to the 500GB (less usable after OP) SSD remember you can MOVE some Steam games (ones that don't benefit much from faster loads) and do general Disk Cleanup etc to free up some space.
 
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