Would you RAID-0 your apps drive?

[ArkiStan]

In response to recommendations in my other thread, I'm planning to get a Raptor HDD for my "apps" drive, and a separate 7200RPM drive for my work.

I'm thinking, I don't play games, so I've never needed much room for apps(10-15GB at most). So I'm thinking, for a little more than a 74MB Raptor, I could RAID-0 two 36MB's....

People say there is an increased possibility of failure, but it's just an apps drive. A failure COULD cost money, but I can always just reinstall the apps. My work and documents would be safe on a separate drive anyway. What are people's thoughts on going RAID 0 on the apps drive?

[Jeffbx]

I'd say no, for several reasons:

1) you're right - it's an increased chance at a drive failure. If one drive dies, you lose your entire partition
2) RAID0 gives little to no increase in performance, and in some cases actually decreases performance (search for RAID0 here & you can see many discussions on the topic)
3) the 72GB Raptors are faster & better built than the 36GB
4) you're increasing the power usage & heat output inside your case with no gain in performance

The primary reason to have the Raptor as your boot device is to speed up the OS & the apps. Stability should be at least a slight concern from the point of view that if you have an error on one of the disks you don't lose any data, but you're going to have to rebuild your machine & reload the apps.

[Kevster]

I had a RAID 0 array of two 40GB drives and over time I developed problems that could not be fixed without breaking the array. Striping with only one controller gives a minor performance boost at the cost of doubling your threat of catastrophic data loss in the event of an HD failure.

If you really want to preserve your data, you can create a mirrored RAID1 array with one disk backing up the other. This is a bit cost prohibitive and you would only get good performance from it if you used two drives on seperate controllers (often referred to as duplexing).

As Jeffbx states above, there are many reasons to not implement a RAID0. I agree with him that the 72GB Raptors are much better than the 36GB ones and with the heat drives throw out into your system these days, you don't need another one soaking up power and adding additional heat to your system that will have to be dealt with.

[ArkiStan]

I'm very glad I asked before doing this. Those are more than enough reasons to stray away from the RAID0 setup....thanks guys.