One other point to mention - RAID is meant to be used with mulitple matched HDD's
RAID 0 & 1 require a minimum of 2 matched HDD's
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Browse All TopicsI am wanting to know if I can add a RAID 0 array to an existing hard drive or do I need to do it before any OS, data is added to the drive to begin with. I was thinking abour adding a RAID 0 array to my new system and wanted to know if I need to do it now or could I wait till later. I will be using the RAID controller on an ASUS motherboard. Thank you.
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Raid 0, disk striping, must be set up before data is put onto it. This is because the data is split across each drive that is part of the Raid. There is no such thing as Raid 0 on one drive.
Raid 1, disk mirroring, on the other hand can be set up after data is on the disk. Depending on the control the data will be mirrored either when set up or while it's being used when the drive is not otherwise in use.
To expand on what grahamnonweiler wrote, for normal pc application usage Raid 0 is a waste if you're looking at using it to increase speed. You can do all kinds of disk performance tests and Raid 0 will show to be faster than a single drive. The problem with these tests is that they don't reflect real day-to-day usage. From personal experience Boot up will be noticably faster but programs, generally, won't be. Going with Raid 0 also increases your chance of losing your data since you now have two drives that can fail instead of only one. If either one fails you can't recover using Raid 0.
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by: grahamnonweilerPosted on 2007-09-14 at 10:43:14ID: 19893603
You must add RAID before anything else!
If you try to add RAID (anytype) after installing OS then you loose all data on the disks.
Additionally, RAID 0 offers very little advantage to average PC use - the increased speed of read is negligble at best.