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Does software RAID 1 (mirroring) in Windows 7 improve read speeds?
I'd like to set up RAID 1 to help protect my important documents (yes, yes, I know it's not a backup), but performance is also important to me. As I understand it, RAID 1 should theoretically be able to improve my read speeds by n times, where n is the number of disks.
Is Windows 7 able to get this boost? I haven't been able to find out this information anywhere.
Depends on the raid controller and model of hard discs what actual performance increase you will experience. Too many variables to give a correct answer. – Moab – 2011-01-02T19:37:17.507
1@Moab: I think he said software RAID. – oKtosiTe – 2011-01-02T19:52:18.330
That he did. he also said Raid 1, mirror will have absolutely no increase in speed, I think he has it confused with Raid 0 – Moab – 2011-01-02T20:12:51.610
I have hardware raid 1, it only reads from one drive, is it different for software raid? – Moab – 2011-01-02T20:22:01.603
2Raid1 can potentially improve READ speeds as each disk is read from in turn in much the same way as a striped array, remember, at this point the same data already exists on both disks. Writing data takes longer than normal as it has to duplicate the effort by writing the same data to both disks. The question refers to reading data.
Since he only has one drive, he will not see any improvement at all. – Tog – 2011-01-02T20:42:30.697
Oops, cut'n'paste error, ignore the last sentence. – Tog – 2011-01-02T21:02:31.763
@Moab: Yes, I said software RAID as oKtosiTe pointed out. No, I didn't confuse RAID 1 with RAID 0, as I specifically mentioned read speeds as Tog pointed out. @Tog: I never said I only have one drive. I have four hard drives. Thank you all for taking a look at my question. – Rich – 2011-01-02T21:23:02.677
I am still not convinced software raid reads from both drives, only more expensive hardware raid controllers do this. – Moab – 2011-01-02T22:19:54.893