What makes you a geek?

[Lissa]

Raid 0 offers little to no performance benefit in average usage. Even in loading levels and such, I've not seen a review that shows substantial benefit. You improve transfer rates, which are generally a small part in the overall performance equation.

It definitely does make a difference to running no raid. When you write data in raid 0, you are writing a number of bits across the the number of drives equal to 8 / # drives simulatneously, so with 4 drives, you are writing a byte across those 4 drives in the time it takes to write 2 bits. Yes, there's some overhead that the controller deals with, but saying that it doesn't improve transfer rates is a misnomer.

SSD on the other hand, exhibits real performance improvements
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc...i=3607&p=4
note the random read and write performance advantages that are something that RAID-0 will do nothing to improve. This is where the performance comes in.

The disadvantages of SSD drives disappear in the storage system I described.
- Networked large files negate the need for very large drives on the "client" machines. Documents, video and audio reside on the storage server, which takes advantage of the $ per gig advantage of SATA. SSD is still expensive, but a $300 SSD drive is comparable in price to a SAS controller alone, and works fine over SATA.
- Reliability concerns are removed by using a mirror array on the server. 2x cheap SATA drives mirrored is the most reliable thing out there besides 2x SAS drives mirrored. Personally I buy a 3rd drive and do a USB mirror every month or two, then keep it in a fire-safe or bring to work to protect against catastrophe.

The files on the SSD would be application data. Games, OS, office apps, etc... these are easily recoverable in the event of failure. Also there should be limited write cycles, though most modern SSDs will shuffle file write locations so the limited write cycles is a virtual non-issue.

Such a setup is not for everyone, for sure. My initial point was that SAS / SCSI for the home user is dead. Even if we look at a single computer, you can have an $80 GB SSD drive for the same cost as a 300GB SAS drive. So if you need 1TB of space, you buy a 1TB SATA drive for the junk where speed doesn't matter (or 2 or 3 for better reliability), then a SSD drive for the OS and speed critical apps. Cheaper than half the storage of 15kRPM SAS drives.

Right, but you're leaving out the problem I noted earlier beyond the price of SSDs, that being that there is a limited number of writes they can perform and system drives tend to have a lot of writes going on. Thus a system drive will wear out sooner if an SSD is used compared to a HDD. The average life expectancy of an SSD configured as a system drive is roughly two years from literature I've read.

Also, if you're looking for reliability, mirroring is not the way to go. If you want the absolute best reliability, ie better than 99.9999999% uptime, you go with Raid 6+5 (Raid 6 is relatively new using 2 parity disks meaning you must have a minimum of 4 disks to do it). In a 6+5 situation, you use 12 disks, but get very little usable space (effectively the combination of 2 drives in a 12 drive scenario), but, the chances of losing data is minimal (you literally have to lose 9 disks, all the same exact ones across all stripes to be toast, it just about takes a disaster that destroys your data center to lose the data). For conventional reliability, 1+0 is good enough, but I have heard of horror stories where even a raid 1+5 wasn't good enough (person I talked to had three campus data centers and a very bad thunderstorm came through, it killed 2 raid 1+5 arrays and almost killed a third). Overall, the higher the raid number, the more reliable it is.

But an increasing number of families have multiple computers, and it begins to make sense to have a netoworked storage location for documents and such so they can be accessible from any computer. The middle-class home of the future will have a netoworked storage solution. Even some of the TV companies are going this route (AT&T U-verse, I believe Dish is doing this with their DVRs as well). It just makes a lot more sense than large drives at every point of access.

This is why Microsoft is pushing their Home Server product. The idea is to create a centralized system that is meant to store the family's information and serve it to the various machines on the home network. This is also the general process behind HTPCs as well, making a single PC your entertainment center.