Newbie RAID 0 questions

[milkydoo]

I just finished reading through the 'what is it' part of Anandtech's RAID faq and hardware review, but I still have a couple of basic questions.

The article stated that if one RAID 0 drive fails, then all data is lost. Now, I take that to mean *completely* fail, as in dead, toss it over the fence. Just for curiosities sake, would you not still be able to send both drives off to a data recovery service?

Also, how do utilities like Windows Sandisk and Norton's Diskdoctor handle the usual scanning and repairs after crashes and lockups? Do you have to have special utiltiy software to replace scandisk, or does scandisk just treat it like two seperate drives.

Last question. If my one non-RAID drive goes bad, I basically have no recovery options, other than through a data recovery service, so in that context, is RAID 0 really any riskier than non-RAID?

Thanks.

 

[ChefJoe]

I would bet that a data recovery service would up the price quite a bit to recover raid0. If you need the data that bad, consider a 3 disk raid setup or just backup critical data to a third disk nightly with a program. The performance increase of raid 0 isn't really enough to warrant risking critical data.

 

[WerewolfX]

Raid 0 Really is not really a form of raid at all. Does it improve disk performance yes. Is it worth possibly loosing 140GB of data (at least in my case) no. If your really want a preformace boost + data redundancy go with a 3 disk array as mentioned above.

 

[Lucky]

I basically have no recovery options, other than through a data recovery service, so in that context, is RAID 0 really any riskier than non-RAID?

Say you have 2 100gig drives, running RAID 0.
On the other hand, you have 2 100 gig drives running seperately.

One drives craps out. In instance one, you lose all 200 gigs of data. In instance 2, you only lose the data on one drive (100 gigs). So yes, its riskier.

 

[Woodchuck2000]

As a general rule, if you don't know that you need raid, you're better off without it. It can be troublesome to use and the failure rate is higher than single drives.

The problem with a 3-disk setup is that you're gonna be running raid5. This requires an expensive controller and really should be reserved for servers and top of the range workstations.

You're better off going with a number of fast IDE drives and using them separately for different purposes.