RAID 0 with two 2 TB drives: speed, capacity, and the zero-redundancy gamble
RAID 0 with two 2 TB drives stripes data across both disks, giving you 4 TB of usable capacity and roughly double the sequential read and write speeds of a single drive. It's the fastest RAID level and the most dangerous: there is zero redundancy. If either drive fails, all data on both drives is gone.
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Storage Efficiency
Survives 1 drive failure
How this is calculated
RAID 0 multiplies failure risk. A single drive might have a 2% annual failure rate. Two drives in RAID 0 have a combined ~4% annual chance of array loss, assuming independent failures. In practice, drives bought at the same time from the same batch tend to fail around the same time, making the real-world risk slightly higher. The speed benefit is real for sequential workloads like video editing scratch disks and large file transfers. For random I/O (boot drives, game libraries), the real-world speedup is much smaller, typically 20-40% rather than the theoretical 2×.
Verdict
RAID 0 makes sense for a video editing scratch disk or a Steam library where the data is easily re-downloadable and speed matters more than safety. Never use it for anything you can't afford to lose. A single fast NVMe SSD will outperform a RAID 0 array of older drives for most workloads anyway.
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Frequently asked questions
Is RAID 0 faster than a single NVMe SSD?
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