Advice on RAID 0

P

Percuvius

New member
I'm currently building a new system and am just waiting on the release of the Palomino chipset , either to purchase it or the 1.33 axia after the price crashes because of Palomino. So far I have purchased an Asus A7v133 mobo, 256MB of Micron CAS2 133 RAM, 2xIBM 30G 7200/ATA 100 HD's and a 300W tower. I didn't go for a DDR system simply because our video cards are too slow to make any kind of difference and the lack of mature DDR platforms. Now to my question seeing as I have 2 IBM deskstars should I run them in RAID 0?
will I notice an increase or will I get too much HD access in gaming.
I should also mention that this new system will be a dedicated gaming machine and my p3 825 will be my work, play and server machine.(I will have 3 systems hooked up to my household ADSL LAN, but one is my girlfriends p2 300 with v3 2000 ugh!)Now seeing as my AMD system will be purely targeted for gaming will a RAID 0 configuration be worthwhile?

Thanks,
Percuvius...
 
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hell yeah! run them in raid... i don't know of any disadvantage to it other than the fact you need 2 hard drives and a controller. my friend runs raid with those exact drives, and he get around 40000 in sandra (this is on an abit VP6) those drives by them selves get about 22000 in sandra in IDE.
 
Actually Pojo, that is my main concern, if one drive goes down both do! I am hoping that today's drives are manufactured much better than yesteryear. The benchmarks look promising, and I do capture video from my camcorder, but with the latest ATi drivers I'm capturing on, my current system does pretty damn nice! Thanks ATi!

I'm thinking that since I have the drives anyways I might as well try it out, if it crashes at least I will only lose game data!

I have read in some threads though that some games stutter on RAID 0 systems and I was wondering if there is any truth to this or if those are just malconfigured systems?

Percuvius...
 
My Advice

My Advice

Get the Quantum Fireball AS. Since they've been acquired by Maxtor or merged, you can get them really cheap and it's faster than the IBM 60GXP in many aspects. The 60GXP is faster than the 75GXP, don't let the higher numbers fool you. The 75GXP can just fit more data, but the 60GXP has a faster sustained data transfer rate.
 
I have two 15gig 75GXP's in RAID-0 on my Abit KA7-100. I did RAID first of all because it had a controller already on my motherboard. I needed another hard drive so I was like, "what the hell? Why not take advantage of it?"

RAID-0 will not benifit you what so ever in games, since rarely do the games actually access the hard drive after they have loaded. Now, it may access your CD-ROM, but usually not the hard drives. I ran a Q3 demo before nad after RAID and I saw NO increase. I did however run HDTach and saw a huge increase.

I like doing some audio/video editing and I've noticed it helps out there a TON. Also, if you run a server it may help. Really, these two things are the only time you'll really benefit from it. If you can do it without buying a controller or spending more money, I say why not? I've not had a single problem with my RAID-0 configuration. I've partitioned my drives like so:

C:\ Windows
D:\ Games
E:\ MP3's
F:\ Downloads/misc BS

If windows ever gets hosed, I just pop in the CD, copy the .cab files to the C:\ partition and run setup again. Simple as that. So in short, do it if:

#1) it doesn't cost you any extra money
#2) you think you will benefit from audio/video editing
#3) bragging rights :p
 
one thing you MUST rememeber......both drives must be IDENTICAL!!!!!!! if not....then one drive will constantly be doing more than the other, etc....so buy 2 of the exact same model hard drive and off you go.
 
well, I would give it a shot if I were you. I have two 15gb gxp75s, and must say I am impressed. Windows boots up much, much faster, games (and game levels) load faster, and they seem to be smoother. Plus, if ut just happens to studder, its incredibly short with two raid drives compared to one. They wont give you more fps, but they are great. When you do it, I would use 16k clusters, as it gave the best performance for me. But since your drives are larger, I have heard that you should use larger cluster sizes (size of cluster is relative, performance wise, to size of drive; so they say). Search the forum, and you should find an old post on this. They are absolutely stable, as far as I know. True, if a drive died, you would lose all data, but I have had this rig running for months, plenty of crashes ( due to a bad mix of memory ), but not once have I had to reinstall anything.
 
Some games, like UT access the HD if you did a full install, because it doesn't even use the CD-ROM. If you have the money, I'd suggest RAID 0+1 for speed AND security. It's pretty aggrivating if one of the HD's didn't write the data completely and you can't access a file. That's never happened to me, but I've had a bad case where I lost my home work, a 12 page essay. That was a b----.
 
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