raid 0 won't give a performance HIT, it will IMPROVE performance in most
disk intensive operations: booting/launching, defragging, searching,
virus/spyware scanning, backup, large file conversions. the boost in
other "everyday" things is not noticable (Word won't type faster!)
most raid 0 solutions today are built-in to the main chipset, and use a
combination of software (in the driver) and some hardware assist (in the
chipset); for the most part the "overhead" is more than made-up-for by the
performance boost.
but remember, if one drive in the array fails then you loose it all. so
backup backup backup (good advice for non-raid 0 too!).
I think the OP screwed up a bit here. He referred to RAID0 as mirroring.
RAID0 is *striping*, RAID1 is *mirroring*. I assume the OP actually meant
mirroring.
The whole purpose of RAID0 is to increase performance, so everything stated
in this post above is correct, including the cautionary notes, for striping.
However, since I believe the OP was actually referring to mirroring, the
situation is slightly different. The performance hit for hardware mirroring
is negligible. There's also so much file buffering taking place and delayed
writes, it would be very difficult to even measure the differences unless
you disabled these functions (which most software performance tools would
do, such as SiSoftware Sandra). In fact, your read performance may increase
slightly since it's theoretically possible for the raid controller to read
BOTH HDs in parallel to retrieve a file. Most people use mirroring to
protect data (as opposed to OS files), which is typically read far more
often than written. So for most cases, there just isn't much need to worry
about performance hits when it comes to hardware RAID.
Of course, if you're referring to software RAID, the situation may be far
different since there is no hardware assist.
