Does RAID 0 truly offer the combined space and performance of all drives?
Capacity will indeed appear as one large, combined drive. Bear in mind however, that data striped across multiple drives is much more vulnerable to loss as a physical failure of even one drive results in the loss of all data on the entire array. If capacity is the goal, it is almost always better to run the two drives as separate units. What about performance? This, we suspect, is the primary reason why so many users doggedly pursue the RAID 0 “holy grail.” This inevitably leads to dissapointment by those that notice little or no performance gain. Theory states that RAID 0 increases the sequential transfer rate, but how much does this really effect performance in contemporary desktop machines? As often indicated in StorageReview’s forums, the answer is: Not much. STR simply does not significantly impact performance of typical desktop applications. There are certain uncommon situations where RAID 0 can significantly improve system performance. For example, editing of large audio or vide
