I'm going to add a couple of drives to my server and I want them setup RAID0. Should I pay $100 for a hardware controller or should I bite the bullet and take the performance hit and go software? How big of a performance hit would it be? I seem to have plenty of cpu for now, but I wouldn't want to use a ton of it just for the hard drives. Here's my current server specs: Windows Server 2003 2 GB RAM Core 2 Duo E6420 2.13 ghz 250 SATA HDD.
If you doing raid for speed, go soft or hard, if for redundant storage, hardware only. In general the software one will be slower, put more load on the CPU and your south bridge and most likely be less reliable. As far as the hardware goes, don't go for a cheap one either, it will be as bad as a software one.
Hardware raid is always best if you're at all serious. Most hosting providers use high quality raid card which help boost performance due to their large cache amounts and also the fact they aren't using your CPU to handle the raid array.
I think the sales lady at my datacenter is retarded. First I asked if they could sell me a RAID controller and 2 250 GB drives setup RAID 0 and she asked if I meant RAID 1. I said no I meant RAID 0 and she replied with this: A raid controller would increase my performance right? So what is she so confused about? Also lol @ suggesting I just get a 500 GB drive instead. I replied to her email immediately but it looks like she was only in the office for a few minutes
To be fair to her the performance of raid-0 is not very much compared to a single drive. You're basically wasting money if you can get a 500GB drive cheaper. You also need to keep in mind with 2 drives your risk for failure increases compared to one as well. Most people on web servers would use raid levels 1 and 5. There are also combined raid levels such as 10 which is very common. Based on this raid-0 seems silly if there are drives you can use that are bigger that cost less then setting up raid.
This can't be true. I've been reading a lot about the performance benefits of RAID0. It's the fastest out of all of them. There's no way two drives reading data at the same time could perform the same as a single drive. I think raid0 would be the most help for the issue I'm having which is an i/o bottleneck while downloading torrents. I suspect once my sites start getting more traffic I'll have an issue there as well. RAID1 would actually give me a performance decrease over a single drive.
So basically databases you might get a gain from it but large stuff it's going to be like if you had 1 drive with more space. Raid-1 would be faster since it's a mirror you'd now have 2 drives with the same data. So if two people visit at the same time each could be served by the other drive for example. However raid-1 will take a performance hit with regards to writes (writing to two drives).
raid-0 will help in performance, but if one of them failed you will lost your data. The best would be raid-10