1 OS and 2 Raid for gaming

D

darknite

Gawd
Joined
Dec 9, 2004
Messages
750
Ok so this will be my first time dwelling into RAID for my use.
I have 2x WD 640 Blacks and 1 WD 80 gig ( can't remember specifics)
I want to put the OS on the 80 and RAID 0 the blacks with all my games installed on this.
Do you think this will give the best performance? Or will it read more off the OS drive?
Right now it's set up the 80 is the OS and i have a 500 for the games.
I like to keep the OS separate from the games.
OS will be Windows 7.
 
RAID0 will increase your sequential transfer speed. You'll still have the same latency to find random bits of data, but once it's going you'll be able to pump the data out twice as fast (since there are two drives, each working on half the data).

Going back a bit, RAID0 helped the load times for big EQ zones. My girl and I had pretty similar systems other than mine having RAID, and I consistently zoned quite a bit faster than she did.

Put the RAID0 where you'll be loading big files from.
 
Why don't you use the raided drive (when raided the 2 show up as 1) as your OS drive, and for your games...what would be wrong with that?
 
Put the OS / Apps / Download on one 640GB and games on the other 640GB.

Raid is just hassle.
 
Im basically trying to acheive the best perfomance for gaming. That is the main use for this pc besides a dvd rip here and there. I like the idea of load times being faster. I play alot of FPS. I'm not really worried about the hassle, i love learning. Hardware is fun.
So far it's a little of everything from yall. I've got 3 of them, but giving one to the wife cuz her drive is older than my daughter i think.
I guess my main question is when i am gaming, it reads more off the drive that the games are installed on right? so thats why i was thinkin of raiding that instead of the OS.

THanks for the replies
 
Last edited:
Why not put it all on the raided drive?...OS AND games FTW!
 
Finally got to get on here. Sick family, work, they always cut into my computer time :D Priorities though.
So I ended up doing the 1x80 gig for OS and 2x640 for the Games.
Does pretty decent. Seems to load levels a bit faster than it was. Maybe 30 seconds or so, don't have an exact time.
HD Tune scores doubled on the gaming drive.
Before:
HDTune_Benchmark_WDC_WD5000AAKS-65Y.png


After:
HDTune_Benchmark_Intel___Raid_0_Vol.png


I Like to keep the OS drive separated from the game drive incase one dies or I like to reinstall Windows. Not too huge of a fan with same drive separate partition. Seem too many things get lost that way.
Thanks for the help and comments guys.
 
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