How important is it to have matching drives in a RAID 0? And if one drive is larger to the other, is the remaining space unusable?
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Raid 0
- Thread starter Ackerman651
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I think you need to do some reading on raid. Yes you should have matching drives, is it absolutely necessary, no. If you have 2 mismatched sized drives you will get the space of the smaller drive times 2. The additional space is unusable. I can't figure out why someone would want to run raid 0 (especially in a laptop) with SSDs available. Maybe it is to increase storage size? No matter the case with raid 0 you are doubling your chances of data loss.
Running RAID0 on a laptop isn't so much about speed as it used to be. As you mention, with SSD's, they are the clear winner if you need speed. However, if you need speed and more than 256/512GB, RAID0 is a good option (another option would be running a spindle/SSD setup like I did in my quad core).
Chance of data loss w/RAID0 is no greater than it is with a single disk. Chance of disk failure is doubled, yes, but that's not directly tied to data loss. Keep good/frequent backups and data loss is no more of a concern in RAID0 than it is with a single disk, or even an SSD. Mac OS includes tools like Time Machine and rsync that make backing up a system brainless. There are also several other utilities available. It's gotten to the point where losing any more than an hour's worth of data is inexcusable. Arguably, losing even that much is easily preventable.
