# Raid 0 or Windows storage spaces to make single volume?



## thevisi0nary (Jan 12, 2021)

I want to take a couple ssds and make them into a single volume with a single drive letter. Would Raid 0 or Windows Storage Spaces be better for doing this?


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## maestro2be (Jan 12, 2021)

Would you be concerned if one drive fails that you will lose everything? Or are you ok with 1 drive going dead, and you being down until you get replacement and then able to completely restore all of your data?

I tend to stay away from RAID0 for those reasons but maybe your use case it would be fine. What do you plan to store on that RAID?


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## telecode101 (Jan 12, 2021)

..


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## thevisi0nary (Jan 12, 2021)

maestro2be said:


> Would you be concerned if one drive fails that you will lose everything? Or are you ok with 1 drive going dead, and you being down until you get replacement and then able to completely restore all of your data?
> 
> I tend to stay away from RAID0 for those reasons but maybe your use case it would be fine. What do you plan to store on that RAID?



Just sample libraries and loose samples. I’m just tired of having everything split up, one volume with one drive letter would make everything so simple.


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## thevisi0nary (Jan 12, 2021)

telecode101 said:


> As he said above. RAID 0 will indeed give you speed and full storage capacity of the disks but you lose everything if one fails. Given how cheap disk space is and how fast disks are these days, i really fail to see the need for RAID 0. You are asking for trouble.
> 
> I haven't really used storage spaces but it looks to me like a new name for the old software disk management that was in windows 7. simple spaces is raid 0. mirror spaces is raid 1. parity spaces looks like raid 5.
> 
> ...



Not doing it for speed, I just want everything sample related to be in one volume for ease of organization. Then there is just my system drive and my samples drive.

I have everything backed up so it’s not a huge hassle if one drive dies and I need to replace the pool.

It only goes bad if one of the drives dies correct?


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## telecode101 (Jan 12, 2021)

..


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## Publius (Jan 12, 2021)

There is always a chance of an SSD failing. I think a multidevice volume is workable. You always need to have a backup process regardless of configuration.


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## Paulogic (Jan 13, 2021)

Raid 0 is only to spread data on 2 rives, but acting as one. Failure of one of the drives results in
total loss of all data. I would not recommend this because even SSD's can suddenly stop working.
Buy 2 bigger drives and user Raid 1 (Mirror) then both drives have exactly the same data but
you only get the space of one drive : 2 drives of 1 TB in Raid 1 equals only 1 TB.
But if speed and capacity is the only main reason, buy a bigger SSD and take backups on regular
bases (Windows Backup or a "file copy batchfile" scheduled every day or so).

Full security and speed can be achieved with Raid 5 or higher, but then you would need to buy
an external enclosure (NAS) which you fill with 3 or more (similar) drives.

For instance : I'm using a normal external SSD, and when I changed something in my libraries
(delete, new,...), I take a manual copy to my Onedrive disk, trusting Microsoft to have sufficient
backups of my files. I'm on a Mac and this works fine.


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## thevisi0nary (Jan 13, 2021)

Paulogic said:


> Raid 0 is only to spread data on 2 rives, but acting as one. Failure of one of the drives results in
> total loss of all data. I would not recommend this because even SSD's can suddenly stop working.
> Buy 2 bigger drives and user Raid 1 (Mirror) then both drives have exactly the same data but
> you only get the space of one drive : 2 drives of 1 TB in Raid 1 equals only 1 TB.
> ...


Trying to avoid buying another ssd until I do a new build. I'm thinking that since all of the data that would be in the raid array is static, then it wouldn't be a huge deal just to copy everything from an external in the even of a failure. 

I mean the only risk is the inconvenience right? Raid or storage spaces doesn't stress the drive any more than normal?


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## Publius (Jan 13, 2021)

Raid 1 5 or any redundancy scheme will increase the bytes written to all participating drives by definition. Raid 0 no. Not sure its much of a concern though. I use google drive for backup. Onedrive is tied to office 365 and i did not want to use that. 

I normally pay more to get more reliable parts. I got a premium power supply, and it failed in two weeks. I sent for a warranty replacement and for a week my server was powered by a cheapo old power supply from my junk drawer--ironic which one was still working. Moral of the story is that 2,000,000 hours mean time between failures can include devices that fail early as long as others go long. Expect your ssd to fail at any time and plan accordingly.

With a multi disk volume, I wonder how windows decides which device to write to? Round robin?


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