Raid 0 still viable for gaming drive?

[fourdegrees11]

Considering picking up a pair of toshiba x300 4tb drives vs a sandisk 960gb SSD. The toshiba has actually shown over 200 mb/s read write, so it's pretty fast for a HD. Any thoughts?

 

[Shmee]

I would still go with the SSD.

 

[LoveMachine]

Fast RAID HDs might have sustained read speeds near a SSD, but will still be trounced in every other metric.

 

[LOCO LAPTOP]

It's not read times you want for games as much as access time.

 

[Coup27]

You're also comparing 8TB of storage vs 960GB.

 

[fourdegrees11]

You're also comparing 8TB of storage vs 960GB.

Well in raid 0 it would be 4 tb still. Raid 0 is supposed to be faster, which is why I'm curious about the solution (never ran any drives in raid before). Games are getting huge with consoles all having BD drives, and all of the add on content for everything etc

 

[Coup27]

Well in raid 0 it would be 4 tb still. Raid 0 is supposed to be faster, which is why I'm curious about the solution (never ran any drives in raid before). Games are getting huge with consoles all having BD drives, and all of the add on content for everything etc

It would still be 8TB in RAID0. RAID0 puts 50% of each file on each disk but you still utilise the entirety of both disks. RAID1 is a mirror where disk 2 is a complete copy of disk 1, thus meaning 2x4TB HDD's only gives you 4TB in total.

It's hard to advise on you which route to take because the routes are completely different.

 

[fourdegrees11]

Shows what I know about raid Since this would be a gaming drive the chance for failure with raid 0 isnt really a concern to me. 8 TB should last me a decade I would hope.

Is there a general idea of how much performance is increased, like 50%?

 

[gradoman]

I'm using a RAID0 Samsung Spinpoint F1s. If I had the money, I'd go with the nearly 1TB SSD as it could hold ~110 games and still have ~ 200GB left over. Not to mention the speed, the ease of use, lack of noise, speed, faster boot, less space required, god forbid you swap motherboards and forget to change the settings in BIOS.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Putting 8TB of data in RAID-0 is lunacy.

 

[fourdegrees11]

Putting 8TB of data in RAID-0 is lunacy.

Why? Is it more likely to fail then a single drive? This would be games only, maybe movies if I got into dling them, but nothing important.

 

[Termie]

Don't do it. I run SSDs in RAID, and it's no faster for games than one SSD. So basically RAID0 hard drives won't do anything for you. Still ultra-slow versus any SSD.

RAID0 stopped making sense years ago for what you're using it for. You won't have 8TB of games you need to play simultaneously...ever.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Why? Is it more likely to fail then a single drive? This would be games only, maybe movies if I got into dling them, but nothing important.

Yes, since one drive dying takes down all your data. You're going to install 8 TB of games?

 

[Coup27]

Why? Is it more likely to fail then a single drive?

um, yeah? RAID0 splits the files equally across as many disks as are in the array but with no parity, so if any disk in the array fails the entire array is lost. The more disks you add, the higher the chance of failure.

These days RAID0 only serves a very specific purpose which is to increase performance in highly sequential read and write workloads. 99% of people don't see a benefit, games included.

The best thing for you to do would be to buy the largest SSD you can afford and then have a WD Green as a secondary storage HDD.

 

[MongGrel]

um, yeah? RAID0 splits the files equally across as many disks as are in the array but with no parity, so if any disk in the array fails the entire array is lost. The more disks you add, the higher the chance of failure.

These days RAID0 only serves a very specific purpose which is to increase performance in highly sequential read and write workloads. 99% of people don't see a benefit, games included.

The best thing for you to do would be to buy the largest SSD you can afford and then have a WD Green as a secondary storage HDD.

This. +1

I do use a couple of SSD's in RAID 0 for the OS, but that was just because the EVO 850's 120s were in sale a few years ago and I all ready had a separate hardware RAID card running 4 x 1TB RE3's.

 

[Joepublic2]

SSD + Steam Mover. Keep the games you're not currently playing on a slow mechanical drive(s).

 

[fourdegrees11]

Well if game load times arent decreased with raid 0 then it's not an option for me. That's pretty much all I really needed to know.

I find the negative comments about 8 tb for a gaming drive amusing, a quick look back at the history of memory and storage requirements should show "too much" now is maybe not enough in 5 years.

 

[Coup27]

You misunderstand. People are negative against having an 8TB RAID0 array. It's just silly considering the whole thing can get lost with one HDD failure or a blip somewhere within the RAID controller / setup. If you need to store enormous amounts of data you want a RAID array which supports redundancy.

Also in 5 years time you maybe able to buy a 4TB SSD for the price of a 1TB one now.

 

[rgallant]

Well if game load times arent decreased with raid 0 then it's not an option for me. That's pretty much all I really needed to know.

I find the negative comments about 8 tb for a gaming drive amusing, a quick look back at the history of memory and storage requirements should show "too much" now is maybe not enough in 5 years.

I roll the dice with 2 x sam 840 pro's 256 R0 because the second one was so cheap to get to 500gbs for os and current games at the time.

but I also do image backups on a 750gb ssd , every 2 days

what would you use to back up 8 TB of drives ?
or time to redownload all those games with no back up.

go for a good ssd

also on the pro raid 0 thing is that a good ssd will max. the speeds of the sata 3 port , raid 0 will double the output/input by using two ports .
but you will only see it in benches or a sata 2 only board using two ports will give you sata 3 speeds. but still might not see/feel it with the raid 0 overhead.

 

[dclive]

Considering picking up a pair of toshiba x300 4tb drives vs a sandisk 960gb SSD. The toshiba has actually shown over 200 mb/s read write, so it's pretty fast for a HD. Any thoughts?

As others have said - RAID for mechanical disks for home is mostly obsolete if the intention is speed. SSDs have trounced mechanical disks so badly there's really nothing they can do to catch up; they're now relegated to bulk storage or online backup usage.

Treat them that way. Get the biggest SSD you can afford, and use your old, slow mechanical hard disks for backups and for games you don't play as much. if your OS isn't on them, but instead just your steam installs, performance for hard disks is "OK".

That's what I do - 256GB SSD ($80) for OS, and then big TB sized HDDs for the game installs of the older stuff. Best of both worlds.

 

[gradoman]

SSD + Steam Mover. Keep the games you're not currently playing on a slow mechanical drive(s).

/off topic, but:

With Steam, you can make a new folder on another drive. Steam Mover isn't really necessary for Steam. Still useful for GOG or Origin that don't allow for multiple installation folders though.

Well if game load times arent decreased with raid 0 then it's not an option for me. That's pretty much all I really needed to know.

I find the negative comments about 8 tb for a gaming drive amusing, a quick look back at the history of memory and storage requirements should show "too much" now is maybe not enough in 5 years.

Load times are improved, but an SSD is better in every way. If you really want to RAID0, then go ahead, but it really isn't worth it.

 

[MongGrel]

I find the negative comments about 8 tb for a gaming drive amusing, a quick look back at the history of memory and storage requirements should show "too much" now is maybe not enough in 5 years.

You were asking for advice.

If you don't want to take it do what you want to I guess.

Most people would find your statement a bit amusing.

Two slow 4 TB HDD's in RAID drives are not going to be that fast.

 

[Cerb]

960GB SSD all the way. Typical <500us access time (usually <200us, probably, depending on model) v. typical 10,000-20,000us access time.

 

[BFG10K]

It's not read times you want for games as much as access time.

Nonsense. Sequential read speeds are all that matter in the vast majority games. Random access performance has little to no impact.

Or to put it another way, if Raid-0 doesn't bring a performance benefit to games, then neither will an SSD.

So even if performance is a wash, JBOD 8TB has far more space and will probably cost less money too.

 

[Cerb]

The majority of games are CPU-bound, except for things like loading lists of saved games, and such (unless you're still on only 4GB of RAM, so nothing's cached, and the game is constantly doing GC to save RAM). Games that stream assets will generally be faster on and SSD, but that tends to be lipstick on a pig.

Installs, updates, modding, backing up, verifying backups, and more, are much faster with an SSD (heck, just browsing folders on it is faster). In the case of needing a lot of storage, or saving money, sure, get an HDD. If not, why? I don't even bother having games on my HDD, and I use an even smaller SSD, that's also got the OS and everything else on it.