Gentoo Forums

HI. I'm currently on UDMA hard disks, but my motherboard supports SATA II, and I was thinking of getting 2 SATA II disks and re-installing Gentoo with / on those SATA II disks in a RAID 0 setup. I would use the kernel/software raid. Have people noticed a performance increase when doing RAID 0 (compared with SATA disks w/o RAID)? I've read mixed opinions in forums, and was just trying to figure out if it was worth it.

TIA!

Simply put - Yes.

Yes, and with doubled failure risk.

There is a reason RAID 0 is known as Kamikaze Raid (and it isn't the speed).

Concur on both points: software RAID 0 is both faster and (at least) 50% down in reliability. The speed comes from interleaving writes to the two drives, effectively doubling the write bandwidth. The solution to the reliability issue is to combine RAID 0 with one of RAID's common fault tolerant modes, typically RAID 1 or 5, resulting in a hybrid. It's called variously RAID 10, 1+0, 1/0, 50, 5+0, 5/0. It's not too practical for most workstation users because it requires a minimum of 4 drives for RAID 10 or 6 drives for RAID 50. Software RAID 10 is supported by the kernel.

- John

Thanks for the input everybody!