Recently I bought a PC that came with a 64GB SSD along with a 300GB 7200 RPM hard disk drive. I thought that they would use the 64GB SSD to install the OS with the HDD acting as a data drive. I was shocked to see that they used a striped raid to combine both drives into one surprisingly fast logical drive.
I never thought of creating a RAID combing the two types of drives. Has anyone else tried this? To me this seems like a great way to get blazing fast boot and general seek times while taking advantage of the cheaper HDDs for extra storage.
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Depends on a number of things, I would think. Striping two drives into one does increase the odds of losing data in a failure, so a backup is a must.
It also depends on what data is written where and in what order, although it's probably fast because the OS and early-install stuff is striped across the SSD drive. Eventually larger data files will just hit the slower drive and the benefit will drop off a bit.
If you're just using it as a general-purpose home computer and aren't looking to increase reliability, then yeah, you'd get a hybrid performance machine that will not be as good as pure SSD in performance but better than two 7200 RPM disks.
Have I done it before? No. I wouldn't want to decrease reliability of my system and increase odds of data loss for the sake of faster drive performance. Soon enough using the system will turn into a baseline of performance and I'll forget that it's "faster", and by the time I notice newer drives and bus technologies will still leave me drumming my fingers wishing my word processor launched a fraction of a second quicker.
Chris S : +1 "Soon enough using the system will turn into a baseline of performance"From Bart Silverstrim -
I've been thinking about this for the last 10-15 minutes and apart from getting a Jonas Brothers tattoo I haven't been able to come up with a stupider idea.
My recommendation: change it today.
Chris S : +1 "Jonas Brothers tattoo"Gaby : @chopper3, ... +1 for making me cackle...From Chopper3 -
A 64GB drive plus a 300GB drive in RAID0 does not make sense. And combining such dramatically different types of disks in a RAID array doesn't fit logically either.
However, an increasingly common arrangement is to attach some flash memory to a normal disk and call it a hybrid drive. These drives offer specific significant benefits, particularly when used with mobile devices.
It's possible that your two drives could have been combined to give the same performance characteristics of a hybrid drive. This wouldn't be automatic, of course; there would have to be some driver deciding which of the two drives to store data on in order to give the best performance boost. Newer hybrid drives do this within the disk itself, though it's conceivable that it could be done purely in software instead, even with two separate disk channels.
From the user's perspective, these drives would be combined to form one larger disk. But it wouldn't be RAID.
From tylerl
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