I didn't know that running raid ran the drives into the ground that fast. I knew they went down down from the strain imposed on them.
I guess thats why everyones buying up those solid state drives or at least the people that have the money.

I think your right, I've kind of lost heart in it without at least on more raptor and I would really like 3 more. The raid 5,raid 0 + 1 does sound ideal.

Darn it, if they didn't make the 10,000rpm drives so expensive.

Thank you for the help.

What sort of speed increase were you hoping for? The results can vary greatly depending on how you use your PC (the type of apps that you run). I consider RAID 0 to be worthwhile doing only on drives that will hold only applications and data that can easily be reinstalled.

In a nutshell, if you don't have a current backup of your RAID 0 volume, and ANY of the drives die... you are screwed. (to put it simply)

I would suggest if you were going to use RAID 0, a typical use might be a volume that has your windows install and perhaps some regular apps etc. All user data etc, I would put on another volume (RAID 1 or 5)

Then if the drive dies, you can replace the drive - recreate a fresh RAID 0 partition and setup windows etc again.

Remember RAID 0 has no data integrity or redundancy built in. It is only as fast as the slowest drive, and as reliable as the 'weakest' drive.

With 3 drives running RAID 0 you would optimistically be looking at a 33% speed increase (calculated against your slowest drive) - because each drive only has to read or write 33% of the data. In practice there are a lot of variables and overheads that mean you won't see anywhere near a 33% speed increase.

With the drives that you mentioned - I would put Windows 7 and open suse both on the 74gb drive (separate partitions).

I would just use the other 2 drives as per normal (no RAID) until you can get another larger drive - either 640 or 250 and then run RAID 1 - if you want some real time integrity - if either drive dies you can just refresh your still working drive across to the new drive and keep working without breaking too much of a sweat.

If you want to combine (in a fashion) the speed of RAID 0 with the protection of RAID 1 - then you can look at RAID 5.

But while you are worried about "losing disk space" by running RAID, you are probably looking for miracles where there is none. Being able to provide extra drives to pay for the overhead that RAID demands is the only way to see the benefits that RAID provides.

There is no free lunch. Even with RAID.

wow I've researching. raids are a pain,
I'm gonna go with a raid 0. I have the right type raid controller on my board to run different size hard drives and not lose the space.

I wonder if the speed increase is worth the trouble, though.

I need anyone's help experienced with raid. I'll be googled and researched some and will be doing a lot more today, but wanted to get an opinion.

Let me brake down my system. 250g hard drive, a 640g hard drive,74gveloci raptor
I have windows 7 upgrade, vista, and been wanting to reinstall open suse

I'll probably lose vista,no need ya know.

I'll put W7 on the veloci raptor, no heres the question- do I split the raptor for raid or do I need another to do it right.

Was gonna run just the system files on the veloci partiton and keep everything else on the 640g, the 250g would be for system file and some program back ups.

Besides gaming , I've been getting video picture editing hence the 640g hard drive.

Any thoughts for a better layout would be appreciated. I was just trying to gain speed to from the raid.