I learnt about Raid modes for hard drive disks and this one in particular is interesting, the more disks you have the more speed they achieve but if one fail the files are lost.

I wonder if any of you tried and what is your experience or if you recomend it.

 

The best is still a full backup of the hard drive C: /. After the installation you burn an emergency start disc. No matter what happens, virus & trojan, encrypted screen ..., insert emergency start disc and your entire hard drive will be restored. This one is recommended: O&O DiskImage Professional.

 

I've used RAID 0 and JBOD configurations, however for home/workstation use they make little sense unless you need one big logical disk. And if you need to go that route then a bigger redundant RAID array would probably make more sense (say, in a NAS server)

Sure the performance is better but you might as well slap a fast SSD on it if that's critical.

 

Last edited by a moderator: May 27, 2021

My Kontakt libs and larger plugin libs like Omnisphere are on a 2 drive QLC SSD RAID 0 array. This was a real game changer for me, loading times a much better... The volume is backed up weekly.

My system disks are single drives in all of my machines and are backed up daily.

 

You are correct that it is definitely the fastest and also if it is by itself, there is not a hot-swappable option to rebuild the array should a drive fail. However, the RAID 10 variant of this is by far the fastest of the other arrays and most reliable, being a mirrored RAID 0. Not cheap but safer? Definitely with the only issue being however many drives you have in the RAID 0 array must be identical in the mirror (RAID 1). Basically a permanent online backup of your drives.

RAID 50 is even more reliable but it was designed for corporate servers and most companies tend to use virtual server clusters these days.

 

I'm gonna answer the OPs question: RAID 0 on HDDs

PROS
- Almost doubles (or 3x with three HDDs etc) speed
CONS
- If one breaks all the data breaks. Backups are thus more important

VERY IMPORTANT
- The access time remains pretty much unchanged
- You must use the same HDD model

RECOMMENDED FOR:
- Big data reads or writes. Backups, big renderings, etc
- If you can't afford SSD it's always better having same data access and double speed
NOT RECOMMENDED FOR:
- Everything that implies a lot of small data reads or writes. Because of the big data access time that makes it slow. Can be the OS: a lot of small files reads. Can be Kontakt Libs: even when in nkx containers there's a lot of small reads.

There're other considerations but these are the most important

 

Can't have a raid of HDDs

If you don't have any HDD

SSD is the way.

 

I forgot to answer the most obvious question
I still use RAID0 with two hard drives for my main documents partition.
I have your average SSD for Windows and a second HDD for audio/video files. Like MP3 songs and movies/shows/videotuts. Despite being big files they don't benefit from high speed.

 

i don't use raid 0. i use raid ant & roach.

 

Thanks, so it's not really that usefull for daily production time but big chunk data. Then it's better to just upgrade to SSD or NVME. 2

 

I've always been using Raid 1

 

Single SSD's are faster, I thought that was common knowledge.
You can also build RAID arrays with SSD's, you just need a decent wallet.
Google it - also if you really want to go the SSD RAID path and have a decent wallet, RAID 10 has less wear and tear on your drives with good reliability and uptime.

 

Yes. It would be more advisable, say, if you edit really big image files with Photoshop. Then raw speed matters more than access time. Compared to DAW work, that is.
SSD's always gonna be better though, that's a fact.