Questions about RAID 0

[ring_wraith]

Thanks to the combination of my unlimited connection and Bitorrent, I find my 160GB Hard Disk Filled to the brim with eh... ah... cough..Linux Distros.

So i thought, why not get another HDD?? So i am going to buy another 160GB HDD. But I have a few questions first:

1) I wanted to set up a RAID 0 Array. What I've heard is that in a RAID 0 Array, the space you can utilize is double the space of the smallest HDD in the array. This happens to be the reason I decided to go for another 160GB and not a larger one. Is what I've heard right?

2) I actually read up a bit about RADI0 arrays and found out that data is broken into chunks which are then written on the same sector on both disks, thus allowing sort of a parallel connection. But here's the issue. A lot of my data (160 GB to be precise) is already present on one disk. So how do I go about re-distributing this data so that it is broken into chunks and stored on 2 disks? Or is this automatic?

3) Will I have to re-install Windows in order to make it utilize the added speed the RAID 0 array offers? Or can I de-fragment or something?

 

[mehulved]

Why do you want to use RAID 0 but? AFAIK, the hassles are not really worth it. Just buy a bigger disk and store data on them both. Why bother with RAID 0?

 

[ring_wraith]

^^ Coz of the performance gains!

 

[mehulved]

^^ Coz of the performance gains!

Why do you need that kind of performance gain? Any special reason? Is the performance gain worth the risk of loosing data? Cos AFAIK, RAID 0 is all lost if one disk goes kaput then if you need to recover data off it, you will need to pay a fortune to recover it.

 

[ring_wraith]

^^ yeah, that is right. But the performance gains are upto 25% in some cases. So that is seriously worth it. Most of my data is easily recoverable files anyway.

 

[mad_max]

1.Yes
2.No idea lol
3.Definately
but seriously bro jst buy a hd with a larger capacity and plug it into your casing unless you're into HD video editing and you can't spend extra money on those scsi disks i can't see a single good reason to use a raid0,cuz its kinda risky and the performence gains you'd see are pretty marginal
but then again i had that raid0 craze a while back so who am i to say no