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RAID 0: Hype or blessing?

@ 2004/08/09

"Stop the RAID 0 insanity!" "There is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer." With these words Storage Review and AnandTech banished RAID 0, or striping, from their desktops. For several years, RAID 0 had been considered the Holy Grail for power users wanting to maximize performance from their hard drives. But according to these two websites the general opinion of pc-enthusiasts was misguided. In their eyes, RAID 0 was useless, a hype, and didn't improve performance on desktop machines at all. The world needed enlightment. No more striping or bragging about transfer rates.

'It is our hope that these findings taken as a whole will stem an internet-wide trend where enthusiast-oriented websites blithely incorporate RAID0 into their "high-end" single-user boxes, ignorant to both theory and empirical results', preached Storage Review.

Harsh words from two leading websites, that made us raise our eyebrows. After all, hadn't our own benchmarks shown time and time again that various RAID-setups can hugely benefit desktop systems? We'd often seen I/O performance increase by forty to sixty percent in striped environments. The over-simplified way in which especially Storage Review takes stance against RAID 0, combined with our doubts about the testing methods of both AnandTech and Storage Review, have led to this article. We can already reveal that our test results are such that there is absolutely no way we will follow Storage Review's advice against the use of striping.

Comment from Sidney @ 2004/08/09

Quote:

You don't judge a Porsche on its capabilities to carry groceries. A car like that serves a different purpose, and it should be judged on that instead - even if it will never fulfill its true purpose in real life. Power users, tweakers and hardware enthusiasts, the target audience AnandTech, Storage Review and Tweakers.net try to please, use their desktop systems in a different way than the pretty blonde next door who only uses it to check her Hotmail account.

Comment from Bosw8er @ 2004/08/09

Personal observations

1) Raid 0 improved the speed noticeably, even while working with basic apps (mail, office, ..)
2) Quality of result of video editing was A LOT better than with 1 disk ... and the operation completed in less time

Comment from jmke @ 2004/08/09

from: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/08/1311241

1. Anandtech and StorageReview benchmarked RAID 0 and found that, for desktop applications, RAID 0 is slightly slower than a single drive, because the things that RAID 0 is good at are not the things that desktops need.

2. So we changed the benchmarks to really need the things that RAID 0 is good at.

3. And now, RAID 0 improves things!

4. Therefore, the benchmarks in #1 were wrong.

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