Poll: GET RAID or NO RAID - your input is requested

Hey before peeps know how to vote they need to know what you will be using your 7700 for. For instance, Gaming? Video editing? 3d rendering? Solitaire? You get the picture. Tell us a little about how you will use your laptop.

No, keep the notm dual drive configuration... Raid 0 is more risk than performance, from the others ive read Raid 0 in this instance wont give you a noticible performance boost, the non redundant raid 0 poses the risk of, "if one drive fails, you will loose all your data" And the redudant raid 1 defeats the pourpose, Just stick to the 120 gig x2 non raid sam performance, and you have the security

RAID0 is pointless, it offers no real world performance increase and doubles your chances of losing all of your data.

most of you people are guided by the misconeceptions that RAID0 = better performance, when in reality all it does is increase a few benchmark numbers by the 10's, nothing more. dont get raid 0, you will see no performance increase in real world apps.

This is much to be debated....

-I agree with Astu well its pretty much what I said HAHA

whats to debate, the only people that think RAID0 is good are people that arent educated enough.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

I don't understand this way of thinking. How often do you have hard drive failures? When you say its more risk... how? Because if one drive fails you lose data on both, but really you should look at it like this: When you do Raid0 you are effectively combining two drives into one large drive. Each drive is running half as hard as it would if it were not in Raid0. So really, aren't you just running the same risk as you would if you had one physical drive?

efectivly my hind quarters, and besides there is no noticable performance boost-(or virtualy none)-So why get raid? for the status qoute of having one? Astu you can back me up on this (I hope)

I'm not talking about the performance boost, I'm talking about the risk of failure. And really, I'm just stating what I think makes sense, but I don't know if I'm right or wrong. So if I'm wrong then that's cool, but can you explain why I'm wrong so I can understand it?

though what you are saying does make sense logically, its not how it works literally.
RAID 0 works like this:

if i make a .txt file and in the file i write 012345. if i have a RAID0 set up the numbers 012 go to drive 1, 345 go to drive 2. they still work as hard as they did before, they just get half the data for each drive.

now with RAID1, 012345 goes to both drives. this way if one fails, the otherone can just copy back over to the other one.

you understand?

Read here: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

I mean I wouldnt get Raid 0 I mean were talking in Laptop proportions, On desktops thats a differnt story. Drive failiures happen, and for some people they can happen often (my cousin)... ,arr the setup for the rays can be a pain, and if smething goes wrong with the array...(which can always happen) BAM you need to set up the array again (lost all youre data), and do more work than what is nessasary (Raid 0 by the way)

Yes that makes sense, thanks Astu. So really each drive is having the same number of read and write operations as it would if it was the only drive in the system. So really it goes back to the risk being if you lose one hard drive you lose the data on both. But two drives being configured in a Raid0 setup doesn't do anything in and of itself to increase the risk of failure, is that right?

It does because each drive has a Mean Time Between Failure rating or MTBF. By using 2 drives in Raid 0 you are halving your mean time between failure scientifically speaking. If you just want to look at it in the literal sense think about how many drives come defective from the factory. You are twice as likely to get a defective drive if you are using 2 of them.

Being a PC tech. you have to consider also the heat output from 2 drives vs 1 drive and will that increase the likelieness of failure? I would think so. You would also want to keep your OS on one partition and your data files on another if Windows takes a dump. If your are vigilant in keeping your data backed up then don't worry about it.

You also have to consider down time if one of your drives dies. How long will it take you to get an exact replacement so you can set up your raid array again? Makes more sense for a workstation to have 2 separate drives than a raid array to most people. I was surprised at how little if any it affects gaming. One of the links in these threads showed no performance gain in 3D games at all. It showed negligible performance gains in loading levels. 3% performance gain in loading a level vs 50% increase in the chance of a failure. Not good math.

Seems to me that in that overview of Raid 0, that having it can increase performance by quite a bit in some situations.

do this get a raid system and convert the system to be a dual drive setup that way if one day u decide HEY i want RAID for some odd reason u have the option

Flatulla speaks truth ! you are the man flat.!

question:

raid 0 vs. single drive

is the down side the same for both??

In one way it is, in another it is not. They are the same in that if the drive fails you lose the data you had on the drive.

RAID 0 doesn't do anything in and of itself to cause drives to fail faster. What it does do is increase your chances of having a failure because it is more complex. In a single drive set up you could have a failure in either the drive or the controller. In a RAID 0 set up, the array could fail because disk 1 fails, disk 2 fails, or the controller fails. The more parts involved, the greater the chance of failure.

One note about RAID 1: It needs to be pointed out here to those that don't know that RAID 1 only protects from hardware failures. Data on a RAID 1 is still just as vulnerable to accidental deletions, virus infection, corruption due to software, etc... as those problems would affect all drives simultaneously.

When working with computers, people need to accept that data loss is inevitable without a good regimen of backup. It doesn't matter whether you're running a single drive config, RAID 0, RAID 1, or even more sophisticated configs like RAID 5 and RAID 0+1, if you don't backup your data to other storage media like CD or DVD, you'll eventually lose it. If its important, back it up.

For me, the risks of RAID 0 are worth the performance increases (I can vouch for those when installing large applications and when encoding video) and even just my technology enthusiast side just to say that I'm running a RAID 0 array.

And really, you if you order RAID 0 and later get uncomfortable with it, you can set it up to run as 2 single drives or even RAID 1. Plus most (if not all) of the cost of putting it on your notebook that make it more than a single drive is just the cost of the extra HDD itself.