I'm recently setting up a new computer and was trying to decide if I should set up RAID 1 on my computer for data redundancy purposes. (so I don't lose data if a drive fails)

My setup has a small (240gb) SSD for Windows and maybe one or two games I play most often, but I know the space won't last long if I put everything on it. So I am planning on getting a 2TB HDD as well or considering 2x 2TB HDD in RAID 1. This is where I am planning on installing the majority of my games.

Is RAID 1 a good idea in terms of the performance of gaming? Will there be issues doing it this way?

Note: the raid configuration is to prevent loss of personal photos and videos and work/life related documents etc. not to protect my games.

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1 Answer

From Wikipedia:

RAID 1

...

Performance

Any read request can be serviced and handled by any drive in the array; thus, depending on the nature of I/O load, random read performance of a RAID 1 array may equal up to the sum of each member's performance,[a] while the write performance remains at the level of a single disk.

However, if disks with different speeds are used in a RAID 1 array, overall write performance is equal to the speed of the slowest disk. Synthetic benchmarks show varying levels of performance improvements when multiple HDDs or SSDs are used in a RAID 1 setup, compared with single-drive performance. However, some synthetic benchmarks also show a drop in performance for the same comparison.

This is mostly consistent with what you'll find across the web meaning, on average, you typically won't notice much of a change in performance under most circumstances.

There are some caveats depending on the implementation of RAID. For example software RAID can sometimes introduce additional CPU overhead which could effect other operations on the system, such as gaming.

TL;DR: Probably little if any impact, possibly faster reads, possibly slower writes.