Best Raid0 stripe size for....?

[Deviationer]

What the best Raid 0 stripe size for 2x80GB 7200rpm SATA HD's that will be used for a general windows xp install and gaming? Gaming as in having 10+ games installed.

[drizzt81]

the stripe size should be 0KB. Using the two drives independently with a smart software install strategy will improve your gaming performance over striping the data, while reducing the complete data loss by drive failure probability.

[Deviationer]

the stripe size should be 0KB. Using the two drives independently with a smart software install strategy will improve your gaming performance over striping the data, while reducing the complete data loss by drive failure probability.

Are you basicly saying don't do RAID 0 at all?

[TheDoucheMan]

the stripe size should be 0KB. Using the two drives independently with a smart software install strategy will improve your gaming performance over striping the data, while reducing the complete data loss by drive failure probability.

Its true. They won't really improve your performance. But if you just want to do it for the wow factor, make sure you have another drive for your important data.

[Deviationer]

Its true. They won't really improve your performance. But if you just want to do it for the wow factor, make sure you have another drive for your important data.

No doing RAID 0 for gaming won't help performace at all?

and I don't really care if my windows install goes to hell randomly because of the raid
other than game-saves the install won't have any important info on it.

[dirtydr]

You may want to read this re: stripe size (http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/concepts/perfStripe.html) if you are set on a level 0 array.

[djnes]

Are you basicly saying don't do RAID 0 at all?
That's pretty much a good rule to follow in general. There's a good list of negatives, but no one can come up with any real positives. It certainly isn't going to offer you have gaming performance increases. If you do some searching on here, you'll find quite a few threads dealing with this, and the general conclusion that RAID0 is useless.

[jaguax]

What is stripe size? Was there something I missed when setting up RAID 0? All I did was hit F10 to go to RAID set up, choose striping, save and quit, then installed the RAID drivers during Windows set up. And now everything is up and running. Was there something I missed?

[dirtydr]

Eyeball the link I posted above. It explains stripe size fairly well.

[TheDoucheMan]

No doing RAID 0 for gaming won't help performace at all?

and I don't really care if my windows install goes to hell randomly because of the raid
other than game-saves the install won't have any important info on it.

Yeah, RAID 0 helps in large file operations, but for small files, the increased seek time is the limiting factor. Raid 0 is best used in situations where you need fast access to very large files, like nonlinear video editing or professional photo editing and graphic design work. And anyone that is serious in those areas will have everything on the raid0 array backed up elsewhere.

[Deviationer]

Yeah, RAID 0 helps in large file operations, but for small files, the increased seek time is the limiting factor. Raid 0 is best used in situations where you need fast access to very large files, like nonlinear video editing or professional photo editing and graphic design work. And anyone that is serious in those areas will have everything on the raid0 array backed up elsewhere.

Thats pretty much what I'm understanding by searching the forums. RAID 0 will provide some improvement on performance if you are playing games that store its files in large chunks like WoW/CSS/Quake4 but for general windows and other games like UT2004 you won't see a performance boost and may even see slightly less performace VS a single drive install.

Reason I'm asking about the Raid 0 stripe is that I'm getting a laptop that has 2GB of ram and 2 SATA 80GB 7200rpm HD's (with a 300GB external HD) So I'm trying to figure out whats the best option. I'll probably just end up testing games out on Raid 0 setup VS Non-Raid 0 and see how I like it.