Nothing he is doing, from your description can benefit in any way, shape or form from RAID ... not on the laptop, not on a desktop. Outside of very specialized applications, RAID simply does not bring anything to the table. We put one on the test bed every 2-3 years and going back to last millenium, have not had an application that benefited.
That being said, RAID is a common thing. We have all our lappies custom build by Clevo resellers and this is what we recommend you do with any lappie over $800. I thing RAID options under $800 will be rare thing. We last put RAID on our test-bed in 11/2013 ... broke both the RAID 0 (2 SSDs) and RAID 1 (2 SSHDs) arrays after about 3 months as they were just a PITA and had 0 advantages. As for the SSds, Samsung wouldn't talk to us about the problems we were having as they "don't support RAID"
http
/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/clevo-guide-v2-0-faq-and-reseller-info.91510/
CLEVO is a large Taiwanese computer company specializing in laptops. While the Clevo brand name is perhaps not widely known, their products are re-branded and sold by known boutique brand OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers)… notably Sager, VoodooPC, Falcon Northwest, Eurocom, etc. They are also considered (by whoever knows about notebooks) to design and manufacturer the best of the best notebooks in terms of superior build quality and innovative designs.
Its really not worth the time and effort to try and distinguish between brands ads almost everyone you ever heard of does not actually **make** a laptop.
The vast majority of laptops on the market are manufactured by a small handful of Taiwan-based Original Design Manufacturers (ODM), although their production bases are located mostly in mainland China.
Major relationships include:
Quanta sells to (among others) HP, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Toshiba, Dell, Sony, Fujitsu and NEC
Compal sells to (among others) Acer, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and HP/Compaq
Wistron (former manufacturing & design division of Acer) sells to Dell, Acer, Lenovo and HP
Inventec sells to Toshiba, HP, Dell and Lenovo
Pegatron sells to Asus, Toshiba, Apple, Dell and Acer
Foxconn sells to Asus, Dell, HP and Apple
Flextronics (former Arima Computer Corporation notebook division) sells to HP
I picked a random 15" model, mid price and hit one with RAID offering
https
/lpc-digital.com/product/sager-np8156-clevo-p650hp6-g/
Two things about Clevo distributors ...
1. Clevo prohibits **advertising** any model below a certain price... once you on phone, its up to you and seller what you negotiate.
2. I always select the *cash* option and pay by business check ... saves a few %
We have used, supplied , recommended nothing but Clevo in over 10 years.
BTW, here'an old THG post from about 10 years ago ... nothing has changed.... I got a chuckle goiung back and looking at it.
===================================================
http/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_0#RAID_0
RAID 0 is useful for setups such as large read-only NFS servers where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.
RAID 0 is also used in some gaming systems where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important. However, real-world tests with games have shown that RAID-0 performance gains are minimal, although some desktop applications will benefit.[1][2]
http/www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2101
"We were hoping to see some sort of performance increase in the game loading tests, but the RAID array didn't give us that. While the scores put the RAID-0 array slightly slower than the single drive Raptor II, you should also remember that these scores are timed by hand and thus, we're dealing within normal variations in the "benchmark".
Our Unreal Tournament 2004 test uses the full version of the game and leaves all settings on defaults. After launching the game, we select Instant Action from the menu, choose Assault mode and select the Robot Factory level. The stop watch timer is started right after the Play button is clicked, and stopped when the loading screen disappears. The test is repeated three times with the final score reported being an average of the three. In order to avoid the effects of caching, we reboot between runs. All times are reported in seconds; lower scores, obviously, being better. In Unreal Tournament, we're left with exactly no performance improvement, thanks to RAID-0
If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.
Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth."
http/www.techwarelabs.com/articles/hardware/raid-and-gaming/index_6.shtml
".....we did not see an increase in FPS through its use. Load times for levels and games was significantly reduced utilizing the Raid controller and array. As we stated we do not expect that the majority of gamers are willing to purchase greater than 4 drives and a controller for this kind of setup. While onboard Raid is an option available to many users you should be aware that using onboard Raid will mean the consumption of CPU time for this task and thus a reduction in performance that may actually lead to worse FPS. An add-on controller will always be the best option until they integrate discreet Raid controllers with their own memory into consumer level motherboards."
http/www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1001325
"However, many have tried to justify/overlook those shortcomings by simply saying "It's faster." Anyone who does this is wrong, wasting their money, and buying into hype. Nothing more."
http/jeff-sue.suite101.com/how-raid-storage-improves-performance-a101975
"The real-world performance benefits possible in a single-user PC situation is not a given for most people, because the benefits rely on multiple independent, simultaneous requests. One person running most desktop applications may not see a big payback in performance because they are not written to do asynchronous I/O to disks. Understanding this can help avoid disappointment."
http
/www.scs-myung.com/v2/index. [...] om_content
"What about performance? This, we suspect, is the primary reason why so many users doggedly pursue the RAID 0 "holy grail." This inevitably leads to dissapointment by those that notice little or no performance gain.....As stated above, first person shooters rarely benefit from RAID 0.__ Frame rates will almost certainly not improve, as they are determined by your video card and processor above all else. In fact, theoretically your FPS frame rate may decrease, since many low-cost RAID controllers (anything made by Highpoint at the tiem of this writing, and most cards from Promise) implement RAID in software, so the process of splitting and combining data across your drives is done by your CPU, which could better be utilized by your game. That said, the CPU overhead of RAID0 is minimal on high-performance processors."
Even the HD manufacturers limit RAID's advantages to very specific applications and non of them involves gaming:
http
/westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/http
/westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/
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