Would it help to speed up a developer workstation to put in a second drive and set up a windows software RAID-1 or RAID-0 (i.e. disk mirroring / striping)? In theory the system could distribute it's reads over both drives, giving almost twice the performance in the best case. But how much does it help in practice? Any numbers?
I am especially interested in your experience with startup times of application servers and if there is a significant speedup of software builds, and on performance when the build / server is running in background.
CLARIFICATION: I am not talking about production servers – I'm just wondering whether this would be a cheap way to speed up the compile-deploy-test cycle when developing an application. Data safety is not important in this context – that's what backups are for.
Best Answer
RAID-0 is not mirroring - it's striping.
RAID-1 is mirroring.
RAID-0 is the fastest in all respects, but at the huge cost of Zero redundancy - so if you don't care about the data, and really care about performance, and think that the disk is your bottleneck (not unlikely), then you can use it.
If you care about both, you can move into the more expensive territory of RAID-10, or RAID-50.
Raid-10 is a RAID-1 of 2 RAID-0s, and RAID-50 is the RAID-5 of three or more RAID-0s.
Similarly, if your hardware supports it, you can do RAID-60 (RAID-6 over RAID-0s). RAID-6 gives you the ability to have more than 1 disk fail per raid, but you'll need more disks obviously, for example in RAID-5, the minimum number of disks is 3, and 1 of the 3 can fail, but if two fail, you've lost your data. RAID-6 will allow you to assign more than one disk for the purpose of redundancy at the cost of less-space, for example you can have a RAID-6 with 8 disks, and have 2 drives (or more) able to fail before you're in trouble.
Bottom line is, never use RAID-0 alone, unless you are certain that you don't care about losing data, and the time that it will take you to setup everything all over again.