Boot to Raid 0 or IDE Windows

[Webrider]

Creating a new system.... New install of Windows XP pro.... Should I make my Raid 0 bootable with a Windows partition or should I use my IDE drive for my operating system.

I'm guessing the advantages of doing it on the raid are speed vs stability.

And now that I have a Raid 0 setup its 500gigs... would you partition that into 3 150 ish's or 5 100's... or single partition?

Going for speed in Games is all this is a 100% gaming machine.

It is an AMD fx55 if that matters in this discussion with 2 gigs memory.

 

[zandor]

Partition a raid 0? I'd run it as two single disks, as raid-0 doesn't really get you much of anything in terms of game loading speed, or one big partition for convienience.

Generally speaking I don't like to have >1 partition for the same OS on a drive, the exceptions being "specialized purposes" like a Linux swap partition or systems with either a single hard drive or otherwise lacking a place to put data files if an OS reinstall is needed.

As far as where to install windows goes, might as well toss it on the raid-0. If one of the disks dies you'll end up reinstalling all your games anyway. Might as well clean house and reload the OS while you're at it.

Now if you'd really like to see a speed boost, since you've got 2GB of ram you can try flipping on large file cache in the registry. It'll let Windows use almost all of your free ram as a disk cache, though it'll deallocate it from the disk cache if a program needs it. In other words it makes the Windows memory manager act more like the Linux memory manager. It definately made a big dent in my load times, particularly when reloading something I've loaded recently.
To enable it, just set this key to 1 and reboot:
\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache

 

[Webrider]

I was under the impression Raid 0 would help my loading speeds from games installed on those drives? What do I need to do then? Before I get to far along in this setup.

And after setting up the Raid array... it was 500 gigs .. so I created 3 partitions....is there a disadvantage to this? Figured it would be easier to manage that way.

 

[zandor]

The main disadvantage of raid-0 is that if one drive goes you lose all the data on the array. Raid-0 makes sequential IO faster due to increased transfer rates but makes random IO slower since it hurts access times. This is because the system has to wait for the desired data to pass under the heads of both drives rather than just one.
IMHO, the main advantage of raid-0 is that it allows multiple drives to be merged into one big volume.

As far as games or other apps go, it depends on the application. When dealing with video editing (Just reading/writing one big file), you can get pretty close to double the throughput with a 2 drive raid-0. Most games are generally a little faster or a little slower. Textures, maps, etc. aren't exactly small, but they aren't huge either. There are, however, some games that use a zillion little files. Usually they're not shooters, but they're out there. If the zillion little files are smaller than your stripe size it'll probably be about as fast as a single drive, since games usually don't issue multiple simultaneous read requests. Reading a bunch of files at once is bad for the performance of a typical single drive PC, since it can result in the drive thrasing around, reading part of a file, coming back for the rest later, and just generally doing a lot of extra seeking.

Regarding file management, if you tend to shuffle lots of things around between drives copying between two independant drives will result in far, far higher performance than copying from one partition on a Raid-0 to another partition. Copying a file to the same physical volume results in a whole lot of seeking, while one disk to another is just a nice smooth sequential operation. Another thing worth mentioning is that moving between disks or partitions is essentially a copy operation. If you want to stick with Raid-0, I'd just make it one big drive, and use directories to keep things orgainized.

When dealing with large copies at work I often find it's faster to copy files temporarily to a different physical disk then back to the target disk if the source and target locations are on the same disk. On the Unix machines at work the best way seems to be to archive the files to be copied using tar, then extract the archive where it's supposed to go. The archiving saves the system the work of having to create the filesystem entries for the files being copied, which is a big win if there are a lot of small files involved.