Windows 7: Considering a RAID Array for Performance

It had been more than a year since I had last looked at adding a RAID array to improve performance.  I could see that my hard drive light was on very often, and the system slowed way down when that happened.  So it seemed advisable to take another shot at RAID.

I had a reasonably good backup arrangement.  As such, I wasn't too worried about the risk of losing data.  My motherboard would accommodate RAID 5 or 10, if I wanted to add more drives, but at this point hard drive supplies were still reeling from the floods in Thailand.  Prices were high on HDDs, and large solid-state devices (SSDs) were still prohibitively expensive.  For at least the near future, I was looking at a two-drive RAID 0.

The main problem with RAID 0 would be the amount of time required to restore my data from backup, and the increased likelihood that I would have to do so (because, in RAID 0, failure of either drive would mean failure of the entire array).  It made sense to make the RAID array as small as possible.  It would need to contain data that I used frequently, but there were a number of other things, less frequently accessed, that I could put onto a third drive that would not be part of the array.  A smaller RAID array would be quicker to restore and would also require smaller, less expensive drives -- which, in turn, would make it more feasible, sometime down the line, to add more drives and switch to a different RAID flavor.

The Moo0 System Monitor was informing me that, at present, my hard drive delays were coming from my existing data drive, not from drive C.  I had not been eager to reinstall Windows onto a new RAIDed drive C.  I was also not too keen on the prospect that Acronis backups and restores involving a RAIDed drive C could be complicated.  So there seemed to be some reason to put my programs partition (drive C) onto that standalone third drive as well.

While I was content with my backup arrangement on a day-to-day basis, I did not presently have an hourly backup.  If I decided to make that third drive a large one, I could use some of its space to store hourly backups.

The plan, then, was for the third drive to contain my drive C partition, my large and infrequently used data items, and perhaps an hourly backup partition.  It could also hold the partition where I stored my Acronis drive images, the partition containing my customized Start Menu and installation-related programs, and the partition that I used for various programs' cache folders and such.  The only partitions on this third drive that would need to be backed up would be drive C, the data partition, and the Start Menu partition.
At this point, there was a pause.  I found myself involved with a large spreadsheet task that was just dragging in its calculations. Those calculations were taking so long that I was forced to take considerable breaks from the project to do other things while Excel would grind away. The problem there was that, when I did come back to the spreadsheet, sometimes it would be several hours later. By that point, my head was no longer tuned in to the project; I was thinking about other things. As a result, I was forgetting and overlooking things that I would have handled much more efficiently if the computer had been able to keep up.

So before installing the RAID array, I upgraded my CPU.  To my surprise, although Moo0 had not seemed to indicate this, the faster CPU contributed noticeably to other tasks as well.  This performance boost took away some of the urgency behind the transition to RAID.

A second hardware upgrade made an even greater difference.  I had found that sometimes I would have to wait quite a while for the screen to keep up when I would switch from one program to another.  I had assumed that the hard drive was the reason.  As I could see from its activity light, it was keeping very busy, and Moo0 was indicating that it was the bottleneck.  Still, it occurred to me that some of the display issues might be due to limits in the motherboard's onboard graphics.  So I installed a 2GB video card.  Suddenly things were *much* better.  It seemed that the hard drive may somehow have been working overtime to compensate for inadequate video.

The speedup wrought by these two upgrades -- the faster CPU and the more capacious video card -- was so substantial as to eliminate, for now, the need for a RAID array.  In that sense, these other hardware upgrades paid for themselves.  I was pleased not to have to spend the time and endure the upheaval that would be involved in getting my data onto a RAID array, as well as the more-than-doubled risk that a single hard drive failure would wipe out all (not just some) of my data.

There were two other considerations favoring my decision to delay the RAID investment until a time of greater need.  First, as I could see, solid state drives (SSDs) were coming down in price.  Second, I was doing some housecleaning, deleting or compressing some materials and putting others onto separate partitions.  It seemed possible that, at some point, an SSD (or, conceivably, an SSD RAID array) containing a smaller set of files would be much more affordable.  Hence, for now, the RAID investment was once again on the back burner.