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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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    To comment on the last part of your question: I wouldn't recommend relying on RAID to serve as a backup. It's primary purpose is to minimize downtime in the event of hardware failure. See this answer about the subject.
    – Ivo Coumans
    Commented Oct 28, 2019 at 7:45
  • @IvoCoumans I agree but I know me, I’m never gonna make backups regularly so at least with raid I’ll protect against the case of hardware failure
    – Aequitas
    Commented Oct 28, 2019 at 7:56
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    To the VTC'er: I agree this is a grey area, but the question is not asking after a recommendation of hardware - it's merely asking after a setting. Since it is targeted at and will directly influence the playing of games, I think it can be read in the light of game-specific hardware.
    – Joachim
    Commented Oct 28, 2019 at 9:27
  • Some modern games really benefit from an SSD these days though (loading times etc). If you're asking about performance going from gaming on the SSD to gaming on the HDD, the performance of a HDD will be a fair bit less than that of an SSD, so you may see increased loading times, even if there is an increase in read speed by utilising RAID1
    – Smock
    Commented Oct 28, 2019 at 10:59
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    Considering that no game is mentioned in this question, I'm leaning towards it being off-topic; it's tech support, and there doesn't seem to be anything specific to gaming in it.
    – Frank
    Commented Oct 28, 2019 at 11:39

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From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

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.

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