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It depends on the RAID. In a RAID 0 system, if you pull out one drive to swap in another, you're going to destroy your array. In a RAID 1 system, you actually SHOULD be able to put in a new (matched) drive and rebuild the array mirror onto it.
Honestly, though, I would suggest you disable RAID once you receive the system. RAID 0 doesn't give enough speed increase to be worth it, and it's going to keep you from swapping out hard drives, and RAID 1 limits your hard disk space, since it just mirrors drive 1 to drive 2.
it depends on which raid setup you have. since the notebook only has 2 drives, it means fault protection (if enabled) has to be as mirrored meaning all data gets written to both drives simultaneously. this means yes, you can remove a drive, replace it with a new one and "rebuild the mirror" after it is installed.
In a RAID-1 setup the disks are mirrored, so if one fails you can replace it and the array will rebuild itself, copying the data from the good drive back to the new one. Typically both drives need to be identical. So yeah there would be limitations. A lot would depend on the raid controller and how it's configured.
Yes but in a raid setup does it also not virtually double the speed of read/writes? Doesnt it push performance up significantly, especially in a SSD system? Sorry if I sound like a novice here, but I am. You give me something to chew on then I'll spit out a steak.
When I look at the options for the 1730, it just says optional RAID 0 RAID 1 functionality. Does that mean that I can learn about and adjust the RAID to how I prefer when i prefer?
Raid-1 (mirroring) offers no increase in speed. In fact it decreases it slightly, since it has to write the same data to two disks instead of one. Usually this is done by a hardware RAID controller so the impact is minimal and you don't notice it.
Raid-0 (striping) is just two drives combined into one partition, as though it were one big disk. There is an increase in performance. How much depends on the configuration and hardware I would guess. But if one drive dies all your data is toast.
You can't swap between Raid-1 and Raid-0 when you want, it would require reformatting the drives and re-installing everything.
There is a big increase in speed when you get to a large disk array, like you would have in a big file server where 5+ fast scsi disks are all in a Raid-5 configuration. But obviously that's another story.
A lot of desktop machines now have Raid-1 and Raid-0 built into the motherboards, since people are storing archives of digital photos etc. on their home computers. And the drives are cheap.
"Using two SanDisk SSD 5000 drives for a RAID 0 configuration almost doubles the read transfer rate to approximately 122 MB/s. The sequential write performance is 70-76 MB/s, which is often inferior to that of conventional hard drives."
The single biggest disadvantage to RAID0 is that you are doubling your risk. In theory, you might double your transfer rates...but in many circumstances you will not.
Echoing Greg, the speed increases for RAID 0 drives are not as huge as that article is making them out to be, and you absolutely cannot just swap drives in and out as you please in a RAID 0 configuration. Doing so would break your array, making all the data on BOTH drives pretty worthless.
Honestly, though, anyone running a RAID 0 array should be keeping a regular backup, since all it takes is for one of those drives to crash, or even develop a minor problem, and the whole kit is worthless until you reformat and reinstall.
RAID 1 makes for a great backup, but, like InLawBiker said, your transfer rates are actually going to be just a hair SLOWER, since you're writing identical data to both drives for dat security.
That RAID 0, RAID 1 option on the site just means that your BIOS has the OPTION to run in RAID 0 or in RAID 1. You'll have to reformat and reinstall if you switch between them, or you can choose to just forget about RAID altogether and run the hard drives as single hard drives.
While I haven't tried it on SSD's, RAID 0 might not be a bad idea there.
RAID 0 doubles your disk bandwidth, but it doesn't affect access times (or makes them slightly worse, even).
On a regular harddrive, that's usually a bad deal. 99% of the time, it's the access time you're kept waiting for, so RAID 0 typically only give s you 0-5% extra performance.
On a SSD, I'd imagine it might be useful though. They have far better access times than a harddrive (so the access time is not so much of a bottleneck), and the max transfer rate is about the same, or a bit lower.
So on SSD's, a RAID 0 setup might actually be worthwhile. But as I said, I haven't tried it, and I generally don't like it much because of the increased risk of data loss.
No, RAID 5 isn't faster. On the contrary, write performance in particular is miserable. Read performance is about the same.
And this leads to a fairly important point. RAID is not about performance.
RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.
The R is the important part here. Redundancy. RAID is to keep data safe if a harddisk dies. Performance is secondary. (And RAID 0 isn't technically speaking RAID at all, since there's no redundancy)
Just keep a basic Image on a a few DVDs and you'll be able to test single drive performance and RAID performance. Just reimage each time.
That's what I did back when I did RAID on a desktop.
RAID 5 is faster than a single drive and has great redundancy and decent capacity overhead trade off compared to RAID 1.
It's not faster than RAID 0. RAID 1 can offer a speed up on reads depending on the controller. If the controller is a good controller with it's own XOR CPU and Cache then it can decide to read and cache from both drives, we're talking high end controllers and few would run just RAID 1 on such a controller.
Wow... I didn't realize i would create such a hotbed. I am hoping to be receiving a M1730, fully loaded in the next 2 weeks or so. This will probably be confirmed today. It would be coming with two 64Gb Samsung SSDs.
I started this thread in hopes of creating the best possible environment to test for performance and, as well to learn how to later test other SSDs in that system.
What I have learned, and I have no problem doing this, is that I would be best served by keeping a complete system backup of whatever choice i choose right off.
Having listened closely, im going to believe that system does not ship with RAID setup, but rather, one master boot drive and a spare.
My curiosity lies in the tests i attached and how they would have doubled the read/writes of them using a RAID configuration.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
