What's better?

[Jpark]

I currently have a seagate 120gb sata hd and wondering what would be better for gaming. Getting another 120gb for a raid setup or running the system off a 16mb cache hd? I know a raptor would be better but I don't see the point in paying so much for such little space. I can sacrifice some speed for storage.

 

[InlineFour]

raid 0 doubles your chance of a hdd failure.

 

[RaiderJ]

Either would probably only affect your practical gaming experience by a very small amount. Between those two choices I'd go with a Raptor over a RAID setup.

 

[John]

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=11

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.......

I'd recommend the WD4000KD

 

[KoolDrew]

Originally posted by: John
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=11

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.......

I'd recommend the WD4000KD

:thumbsup:

 

[Arcanedeath]

I'll 3rd the WD4000KD

 

[Greenman]

Originally posted by: John
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=11

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.......

I'd recommend the WD4000KD

I use raid 0, and like it. 90 megs a second sustained throughput is pretty good.

 

[JEDIYoda]

quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That is just totally bogus!
If you use raid0 any dummy knows that you need to always backup anything you desire to keep. Such as family photos......movies etc....
Also you don`t back up your info onto the raid0 config....doh
Also if you are a hardcore gamer there are tremendous advantages to using a raid0 config.
providing you are willing to lose your info should one harddrive fail.

Sure you could go out and by a 10,000 or a 13,000 or a 15,000rpm harddrive.
But then you have those who have 2 -- 10,000 rpm harddrives set up in a raid0 config....

I don`t buy any of the above arguments as long as you are willing to use your head and backup anything that you are afraid to lose.

Habe fun!!

 

[MobiusPizza]

Originally posted by: JEDIYoda
quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That is just totally bogus!
If you use raid0 any dummy knows that you need to always backup anything you desire to keep. Such as family photos......movies etc....
Also you don`t back up your info onto the raid0 config....doh
Also if you are a hardcore gamer there are tremendous advantages to using a raid0 config.
providing you are willing to lose your info should one harddrive fail.

Sure you could go out and by a 10,000 or a 13,000 or a 15,000rpm harddrive.
But then you have those who have 2 -- 10,000 rpm harddrives set up in a raid0 config....

I don`t buy any of the above arguments as long as you are willing to use your head and backup anything that you are afraid to lose.

Habe fun!!

I do think that RAID 0 offers no real world performance increase except sustained sequential read speed which is hardly utilised by any applications except file transfer or Video editing

Also RAID 0 increases access time which means lower general performance on searching and accessing files

 

[amdskip]

I had a Raid 0 setup with 2 Seagate 160gb hard drives and now with my new 64 system I am just using a single seagate 200gb drive as my boot drive. I cannot stand it and soon I will be getting 2 new drives for a raid 0 setup. There is most definately a speed increase with the raid 0 setup.

 

[JEDIYoda]

Originally posted by: amdskip
I had a Raid 0 setup with 2 Seagate 160gb hard drives and now with my new 64 system I am just using a single seagate 200gb drive as my boot drive. I cannot stand it and soon I will be getting 2 new drives for a raid 0 setup. There is most definately a speed increase with the raid 0 setup.

YES!! there is a very visible speed increase using a raid0 config.
Those who are not hardcore gamers or who have no experience using a raid0 for gaming would have no clue what they are talking about!

 

[ribbon13]

Uncontended points from the last RAID0 thread:

Originally posted by: HendrixFan
It would seem that NONE of you actually read the article I linked to. It shows numbers for things used in desktop systems, especially when multitasking.

Why would you test things that dont stress a hard drive if you are testing RAID? Does anand fail to show the "real world" results of a CPU by not showing us the little improvement we get in "real world" apps like IE, Firefox, Winamp, etc? If you are testing a component, you need to test where it makes a difference. It is then up to a user to decide if those things matter.

In the tweakers article, they show that using newer versions of the programs you can see more benefit. They also show that using a hardware solution provides benefit.

As far as things that no typical user would do, here are things they test and show a near linear improvement as drives are increased (up to 4 drives in RAID 0):

Filecopy
Winzip compression
Virusscan
Defrag
Windows Bootup
Windows User Switch
Software Install
Windows Update
DVD Ripping
Audio Edit
Photoshop load/save

You tell me if users will ever come across these "strange" scenarios on their computer, much less more than one at a time (where RAID really seperates from a single drive).

That said a RAID0 of WD4000KDs would really rock! RAID5 even more so. But definately get a single WD4000KD.

 

[Zepper]

16MB cache beats RAID-0 on a stand-alone PC any day. Read the articles on RAID over on AnandTech and at StorageReview.com and decide for yourself.

.bh.

 

[t3h l337 n3wb]

I've gone from RAID 0 with 2 80GB 7200RPM SATA drives to my RAID 5 now, and I did see a noticeable decrease in speed. Windows boots up slower, and stuff loads slower too. However, I really don't care, since I like the security of data redundancy, and it's a hell of a lot faster than the crappy Northwood Celeron laptop I was on before. Heck, anything would seem fast compared to that...

 

[spookynutz]

I've played with a raid 0 setup on my current system and although there is probably a quantifiable speed benefit for certain tasks, that extra harddrive is usually put to better use as a separate storage device. If you're only juggling data with two drives, it's better to just offload the paging file, media and any other archivable data to one and run the OS off the other. Then you realize a bit of a speed benefit, have access to that extra storage, fragmentation becomes even less of and issue and you don't have to worry about speed-matching the drives.

No offense to anyone in the thread, but if your harddrive is constantly thrashing while playing games, arraying your harddrives for extra throughput is a pretty counter-intuitive way of solving that problem.

 

[zest]

Raid is faster but with risk of data loss.

SATA 2 is a better choice...

 

[t3h l337 n3wb]

Originally posted by: zest
Raid is faster but with risk of data loss.

SATA 2 is a better choice...

...SATA2 gives absolutely no performance increase.

 

[JEDIYoda]

Originally posted by: Zepper
16MB cache beats RAID-0 on a stand-alone PC any day. Read the articles on RAID over on AnandTech and at StorageReview.com and decide for yourself.

.bh.

While I respect your opinion Zepper....
I will tell you that most of us who use raid0 already have at leats an 8mb buffer and some are even going to get 2 new h/d with the 16mb buffer alomg with doinf a raid0 config..

 

[Googer]

Add a poll to the top of the page. I vote for 16MB cache. RAID 0 actuly slows down general desktop and gaming performance. RAID 0 is good for server and digital video but not for games and general use.

 

[Googer]

 

[eno]

Don't really care what people say or reviews state about Raid 0. I have been running Dual 36gb Raptors for about 2years now, and while loading games all I can say is I load first into the game 99% of the time. Its pretty ammusing in BF2 to jump in the jet and get to the other teams main base just to steal their helicopter before they have a chance to take off in it. Not that this is some scientific test , but I can tell the benefits just by using my system. And I run raid 1 with dual 250gb 16mb MaxtorIII in my home file server. I have no worries if a Raptor drive fails in my Raid 0 setup, I image them every month over the network to file server. So if one fails I still have another 3yrs of warranty, they will RMA a new drive, I will recreate the RAID 0 setup and reimage back onto it.

However I will admit Raid 0 is more of a pain to work with, drivers/F6/restoring from image. But my Raptors will forever stay in a Raid 0 setup, worth every penny in my book.

 

[fire400]

no poll..............why why why

 

[Jpark]

Originally posted by: fire400
no poll..............why why why

poll added

 

[imported_rod]

What about RAID 1+0? Anyone had any experience with these?

RoD

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: rod
What about RAID 1+0? Anyone had any experience with these?

RoD

It's the safe version of RAID 0.