Dear Silent PC Gurus,

Should I be concerned about the noise of a RAID hard drive with striping? I am thinking about getting RAID hard drives for performance, but don't want to suffer noise as a side effect.

By the way, does anyone have any thoughts about whether RAID striping will really offer noticeable performance gains if I primarily use Microsoft Office and Compilers?

Thanks,

Don

It's the hard drives themselves that dictate the noise level, not the act of Raiding.

And the general consensus is that Raid-0 has very little performance benefits on small files like Office and Compilers. I've noticed this to be the case as well.

Actually, seek noise can be more of a problem in RAID since the drives are synchronized. This will be pretty subjective and depend mainly on the specific components.

I hadn't thought about that. But since I have a Raid-1 and a Raid-0 system with different drive types, I can definitely say that drive type makes more of a difference than the Raid factor (e.g. The samsung Raid is virtually inaudible when accessed, but the Seagates sounds like a drummer).

Dear sthayashi and HammerSandwich,

Thanks for the quick reply! I gather that RAID is not necessarily noisy, but it can be so, and that I will not see much performance gain when using Office apps and compilers. So I won't get it.

Thanks again,

Don (vzbt7y)

For anyone considering using Raid striping - make sure you back up everything of value on the striped drives. I found out the hard way when one of my striped drives died and I lost everything on both. The slight performance benefit certainly wasn't worth the trauma it caused me! It was quiet though, using two Seagate Barracuda IVs (or maybe V's), as I remember.

vzbt7y. The flip side is mirroring, i.e. Raid-1. The performance hit taken is very small. But I can tell you personally that I've taken advantage of Raid-1. There is no way I can describe the feeling you get when you see the message, "Half your Raid-1 array has failed. Would you like to rebuild the array w/ a new drive?" And the thought that if that were a Raid-0, I would cry.