Originally posted by: Weenus
I have 2 ide hd's in my current rig, and my mobo is raid compatable.
My question is this, what is raid, how do implement it, do i need it, and does it require reformatting?
Im a gamer so any performance enhancers im always down for
I have 1GB of ddr pc3200 ram
and a amd athlon 64 3200+
ty for denoobifying me
If you have windows 2000 or XP, you should be able to use the software RAID functions. Though for a gamer, the results you get may not make you overjoyed at the effort of reinstalling the OS.
First you will have to boot and load up whatever onboard RAID options in the BIOS. Then enter the RAID BIOS options and configure the disks. Either RAID 0, Striping (Writes data to disk 1, then disk2, then disk 1, etc). Or with RAID 1, Mirroring (Data is written to both disks at the same time, slight write penaties due to the wait time for the writes to be applied against each disk).
For games, with RAID 0, you will get marginal decreases in load times, but not much else.
Where it does help, if you are downloading a lot of data, running something like an MP3 player pulling songs off the same disk, etc you will get less stuttering as you have two physical drives working to push the data out instead of just one. Though in a situation like that you may be better served to run two discrete partitions on two seperate drives to avoid I/O contention between the two devices.
Cliffs:
No huge gains for even RAID 0.
Must reload the OS.
More troubleshooting boot problems with the inclusion of RAID in the mix.
For higher I/O usage setups, IE streaming video, etc RAID arrays make more sense. Or if you want fault tolerance if one drive fails you can continue to use your computer, which is one of the best features of RAID.