Why is Raid 0 not used more?

[RobinS]

I realize that almost all Mac users are woefully ignorant of computer hardware technology - probably the main reason they opt for a Mac. But there are still thousands of dedicated Mac enthusiasts out there that seem to be informed, and yet I almost never hear of anyone using Raid 0 for increased performance. I wonder what is the point of spending untold thousands on a Mac Pro and NOT use Raid 0, especially when 36gb Western Digital Raptors (with the 16mb cache) are so cheap. 4 would be great for the OS and Applications and not cost much at all with a standard 7200 rpm large Sata drive for everything else and should give screaming performance. One could use the highly respected Raid 0 built into OS X. And is there any advantage of using Leopard with Raid 0?

 

[eric2006]

Raid 0 offers performance at the cost of reliability. With a 4-drive setup, I increase the possibility of total data loss by 4. It is useful if you keep backups, or for non-critical data.

 

[DeltaMac]

I realize that almost all Mac users are woefully ignorant of computer hardware technology - probably the main reason they opt for a Mac.

There's no excuse for the trolling remarks....eh? Here's the _real_ expression - paraphrased -

I realize that almost all computer users are woefully ignorant of computer hardware technology

-

I have about 10 Mac customers (out of about 5,000 or so total) that I know use a RAID setup in some form. I would suspect that the general computer userbase is not that much different, and in the Windows world the percentage of RAID users would be much lower in other than speciality areas.

I have talked to hundreds of Dell customers on response to Dell warranty issues. You get everything from IT expert super-users, to those who struggle to find the right plug for the power cord...
I suspect you also have seen the same with PC users, even as you accuse Mac users of ignorance.

 

[nixgeek]

Playing devil's advocate here, he did acknowledge that there were also many Mac enthusiasts that do know about this kind of stuff yet probably never employ the use of this technology. I almost blasted him as well until I decided to withhold the impulse and give him the benefit of the doubt. Yes, it did come off as being a bit trollish and probably could have been worded better, but so be it.

Then again as you mentioned, DeltaMac, this isn't just a Mac user issue. I know of many Windows and GNU/Linux PC users that don't do this either. I'll even go as far as to say that the lack of knowledge about the procedure is also evident in the Windows and GNU/Linux PC group of end-users.

From what I've seen online, the real world benefits of RAID 0 are negligible. Sure, they win benchmarks, but beyond that they don't offer much benefit over a standard non-RAID config.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Not to mention that Apple only ships a software implementation of RAID on their desktop machines, whose performance can't touch a true hardware RAID setup.

I have a RAID 0 in one machine and a RAID 1 in another running off of aCard-branded PCI cards... both run beautifully, and the performance increase on the machine using RAID 0 is phenomenal over my single-drive machines. Both reads and writes are almost doubled, especially on the write side of things.