Thinking of a Raid setup.

[Killajaz]

Looking forward to upgrading my rig.
I as thinking of running two 250/300 gb SATA2 drives and perhaps in a raid configuration for more speed.

I have never had any raid setups before I have heard RAID is bound to fail at some point if the drives are used a lot. In certain configurations all data is lost if one drive fails, right?

I would like to have either two Samsung or WD drives in a RAID setup which will give me a noticable speed increase but not lose in reliability.
Is this possible or should I just stick to single drives?

I read some reviews about samsung and WDC and it seems samsung are quiet but WD are faster for gaming. I do have a WDC 250 which im pleased with and I do not think it is loud.

What would you recommend? I play games and do use the PC for photoshop, video editing, some encoding and the usual yadda yadda...

 

[semi-pro waster]

With 2 drives you can either have Raid0(striping for reading & writing speed but no redundancy) or Raid1(mirroring which means security but only an increase in read speeds, if at all).

I'd probably not advise either unless you have a good use, Raid0 shouldn't be used unless you either have a good backup strategy or you don't care if you lose your data. What I would say is unless you have already bought the hard drives you might want to go for the Seagate 7200.10s, about the best combination of performance to price around right now.

 

[SiriusB]

Agree with Semi-Pro. Unless you have a specific need it is usually not worth the cost and sometimes effort of setting up a RAID array.

But, as said, if you have the capacity to backup all your data then RAID0 might be a nice option. RAID1 seems like the hard way to backing up your data lol.

SiriusB

 

[Killajaz]

Thanks for the replies!

Not yet bought any drives, will deffo have a look at the Seagates.