Is there a guide on how to do raid 0?

lazyf3

Hello,

I was searching and doing researching on how to setup RAID, but was lost on how to do it. I saw that linux doesn't like Hardware RAID and I'm not quite sure how to use mdadm to setup up the RAID. I recently made a new PC and was hoping to set my two 2tb hard drives to raid 0 for gaming. I wasn't sure if I needed to do it in the live environment or after.

Thank you.

kaktuspalme

Do you want to install your OS on Raid 0 too? I'm not sure if that is supported in Solus.
Otherwise you could install Solus normally and create the raid 0 after that. But I don't think you get a big improvement from Raid 0 for gaming. The problem with normal hard drive is that you have slow random access times and because of that low IOPS. Raid 0 doesn't make that better. Raid 0 in my opinion is only useful if you transfer big files sequentially.

WetGeek

kaktuspalme Do you want to install your OS on Raid 0 too? I'm not sure if that is supported in Solus.

I'm guessing it's okay. Raid 0 means no raid at all, just concatenates the two disks into 1 for all practical purposes.

Could be unsupported for some reason I don't understand, but it would be a real surprise to me!

lazyf3

kaktuspalme I don't want the OS on Raid 0, just the hard drives. There's no significant improvement for gaming using raid 0? I'll take a look through it again. I'll just leave it as is then. Thank you for the insight

kaktuspalme

WetGeek Not really. In Raid 0 you split the data on to multiple disks. What you are talking about is JBOD.

kaktuspalme

lazyf3 When the OS isn't on Raid 0, you can probably just follow https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/RAID#Installation . But warnings ahead I never set up a Raid 0 on Solus.

Yes I think there won't be a big improvement, but don't take my words for granted. Sometimes it's just better to try it out yourself instead of reading a comment from a random dude in the internet 😉

Edit: Maybe easier then setting up mdadm would be to use btrfs for your gaming partition:
mkfs.btrfs -d raid0 /dev/yourdevice1 /dev/yourdevice2

WetGeek

kaktuspalme What you are talking about is JBOD.

Thanks for the correction. It's been a long time since I've set up a RAID system.