Question about RAID

[Turbo55]

I have the Asus A7V w/ a built-in Promise Controller. I heard that running RAID 0 can thereotically double the speed of your I/O. Does it come near that performance in practice? I also heard that many people do no suggest getting another HD just to do a RAID 0, b/c RAID is primary for data redundacy/ reliability. What are other cost effective ways of speeding up system performance w/o implementing a RAID 0, such as putting the swapping file in another HD if avialable.

 

[DaveK]

Well, the speed increase is not anywhere near double the performance. I believe it works out to be about 30%-40% better performance over 1 drive, with RAID 0.

If you are just looking for speed, RAID 0 will definitely do the trick. It's not the most reliable thing in the world, and you'll probably want to have your system drive on a disk that's not RAIDed.

Swap file on a different hard disk will help out a bit, but you'd be much better off getting more memory if you are swapping that much.

DaveK