Why RAID is (usually) a Terrible Idea

[russki]

I would like to see someone who just got their first pc set up raid...

Yeah, like people posting "how do I enable RAID...do I plug them into SATA1&2 for RAID 0 and 3&4 for RAID 1..." I'm paraphrasing, but it actually happened.

By the way, you know you are an exception and not the rule as far as your exuberance goes in the quest for every little bit of performance. I can't blame you - it's worth it for you - but it is hardly common and potentially hardly rational.

 

[rammedstein]

most people don't understand that, depending on what you want to do, raid 0 can do that too, for lower access times, give yourself a 16k stripe size, access times drop likes files, but so do read speeds and cpu usage skyrockets (for those using an onboard solution), the most drives you add and the lower the stripe size the faster the access time, and if you keep adding drives, sustained reads will pick up too, unfortunately again, so will cpu usage...

i solved the problem, i origonally had an e4300 and 2 drives in raid 0 with a 64k stripe size, it was an average performance boost over 1 drive, but not enough to make it worth while, s i switched to 4 drives with a 16k stripe size, i don't get much better sustained speeds than the 2x drives but my acess times are a quater, and eventually i cracked my die on my e4300 so i switched it out for a q6600, and i have buckets of cpu to spare, so i am more the merrier. unfortunately, if you don;t know what you are doign you won't acheive good results, or even worse, risk data loss and many other horrid things.

 

[ausch30]

I think the moral of the story is that if you don't know what RAID is and can't build the array yourself then you shouldn't use it. Once you've gained the requisite knowledge then you can build your array and live happily ever after.