RAID 0 Technology on T410?

[Yakl]

Hello fellow thinkpadders
I was reading about the Sony Vaio Z series and looking through their configurations when I noticed that they were using something they called “RAID 0 Technology” in their laptops that, from what I understood, linked two SSDs into the machine. This made me wonder, whether or not that could be done with my T410 if I needed to expand the memory someday.

Thanks for the feedback!

[Navck]

RAID 0 and SSDs is something I wince at, namely because you can mess with the wear leveling (It becomes unhappy on certain controllers, don't quote me on this.)

And yes, your T410 can do RAID 0 using the Ultrabay, I don't recommend it.

[Yakl]

But then I lose the DVD drive right?

[Norway Pad]

Correct. You will have to sacrifice the optical drive in order to run a 2nd internal hard drive.

[ThinkRob]

Wait... Raid 0?!

Shudder.

I hope RAID 1 is an option...

[tylerwylie]

edit double post

[tylerwylie]

Wait... Raid 0?!

Shudder.

I hope RAID 1 is an option...

With SSD's would be awesome, just keep backups. It depends on what the user wants to obtain, Raid0 is riskier than Raid1, but has greater performance gains. Just beware of the risks and keep backups, though Raid1 data loss can be common due to software bugs as well.

Which is why we all should be using a fault tolerant file system as well, see: HAMMER

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAMMER

[Yakl]

Then I might have to rethink doing it. That just defeats the purpose of getting a ThinkPad and the safetey of the information on it.

[Navck]

Sometimes RAID 0ing SSDs yields little performance gain ("Obviously two = 2x performance" does not apply here) due to controller overhead.

Enjoy (And yes, you can RAID 0 harddrives if you want twice the power consumption and 1.x the performance increase, neat how diminishing returns work.)

And RAID 1 is another option (... But I just backup the data I care for into a 1TB RE3 in an eSATA enclosure.)

[Yakl]

Yes I also found it really dumb after reading about it.
btw Navck do you use RAID 1? And if so how did you do it?

[ThinkRob]

Personally I'd be a little to scared of RAID-0 to use it with consumer drives in a laptop. A desktop? Perhaps. A server? No question. Laptops, on the other hand, go through a lot more bumps and jolts, and even with HDAPS I'd be a little too scared of mechanical drive failure to want to use RAID-0.

With an SSD, it's different, and I suppose that if I were using an SLC drive I _might_ consider it. Still: I actually have two SSDs in my T500, and although I certainly considered RAID, I found that since I didn't actually need the space to be contiguous, plain old mounts (and/or union mounts) worked just fine.

IMHO, RAID is best left for the server room.

[Mike Blake]

...you can RAID 0 harddrives if you
want twice the power consumption

Wait, wouldn't that mean they'd run much hotter?
Not a feature I would want in a laptop.

[tylerwylie]

The use I'd have for dual HD's in a T410 is giving a dedicated HD to virtual machines that operates on a separate drive for some beefy performance.

[ThinkRob]

Wait, wouldn't that mean they'd run much hotter?
Not a feature I would want in a laptop.

Not really. The laptop itself might generate marginally more heat (assuming you were *really* using both drives heavily), but each drive will operate at its normal temperature.

[mediasponge]

IMO, RAID 0 is only useful for data you really don't care about. Consider this: If you have two hard drives, you have doubled the odds that one of them will fail in a given period of time. If your boot volume is striped across 2 drives in RAID 0, then the odds are 100% that your machine will not be bootable after a single-disk failure. If your boot volume and data volume are separate, odds are only 50% the machine is not bootable after a single-disk failure. On a compute server, RAID 0 makes sense for a local scratch disk so it can access local data faster than going over the network. There is no redundancy in RAID 0. On a desktop or laptop, RAID 0 makes no sense to me. Even on a server, the boot volume should not be RAID 0. If you have 3 or more drives, then higher levels of RAID make more sense. True RAID requires a dedicated hardware controller, as opposed to software RAID.