Best RAID configuration for a pair of drives for maximum speed.

[Feek]

With just two drives, it's gotta be RAID 0 hasn't it? We've been talking about it at work today and a guy here who's always right *sigh* is insisting that RAID 1 will be faster than RAID 0 when using a pair of identical drives but I disagree and think that the latter is better.

Backups or potential disk failures are unimportant, it's just maximum performance that we're interested in.

The OS of the PC in question is Vista x64 Ultimate.

And... In RAID 0, is the total capacity the sum of the two drives or is there any slight loss?

[Daz]

You're correct. And RAID0 is the total capacity, there's no trade off for parity or anything (because there isnt any).

[edit]There are *some* configurations where you would use many RAID-1 one arrays over fewer RAID-0/RAID10 arrays, but I imagine you were talking pretty generally.

[kaiowas]

Whilst RAID 0 is traditionally considered to give better performance I'm sure I remember reading an article which considered a situation where counter intuitively RAID 1 gave better performance, just can't remember much about it. Was hoping Daz would post about it as I seem to recall it was him who first posted it but it may not have been.

[kaiowas]

OK so my memory only partially failed me, this was the thread I was thinking of:

http://www.boat-drinks.co.uk/showthread.php?t=4507

Wrong RAID configurations but at least I got the poster right :p

[Feek]

I think that 0 with a good backup plan is the way to go.

[Daz]

It's what I do Feek :) On the workstations anyway, the server is 10.

And aye, Phil, where you have more control over what an application does you can baby some better performance out of a large number of disks :) Was a good article that.

Certainly not with 2 disks though.

[Garp]

For servers needing raw spindle speed (primarily mail servers) we go with RAID 1+0, that gives us sufficient safety margin there disk wise. For anything else we go RAID5.

Desktops, RAID1 isn't going to present you any advantages over RAID0 speed wise, the trade off being the chance of a disk failure. However on a desktop is that really critical? Decent backup plan is a far better choice and would still be something I'd recommend even if you did go with RAID 1, because you can still corrupt files on RAID1 :)