New gaming machine. Should I use raid?

M

M4573R

Gawd
Joined
Jul 30, 2006
Messages
522
With hard drives so cheap now, is it beneficial enough to use something raid 01 for a gaming machine? Is it reliable enough to where I shouldn't ever* have a problem?
 
If you get a virus/malware, it will infect all drives, so draw your own conclusion.
If thats not what you are asking, please tell us what you want to know.
 
M4573R said:
With hard drives so cheap now, is it beneficial enough to use something raid 01 for a gaming machine?
Click to expand...

It's best to get one big fast drive. RAID isn't going improve game load times much. Get a separate external drive for backups.

A regular HDD for the OS and a SSD for applications would give you great load times, but I don't think its worth the cost right now. Give it a year or so.

Is it reliable enough to where I shouldn't ever* have a problem?
Click to expand...
All hard drives will fail eventually. RAID 1 or 0+1 gives you redundancy, but it is not a backup. If something damages your data then you're screwed.
 
The fastest drives are the newer Raptor series and any drive that uses 330GB or 512GB platters.
Raptors give you pretty quick transfer rates and very good seek times.
The other drives give very quick transfer rates and normal seek times.
512GB platter drives are approx 50% faster than drives using 330GB platters.
For measure, I'm using a Samsug HD103UJ 1TB drive with 330GB platters and its average transfer rate is over 90MB/s. I love this drive, its fast enough for me (for now at least) :)

Have you considered SSD's?
They have almost zero seek time (relative to hard drives) and you can RAID them for massive transfer rates.
The downside is that the performance versions use methods of wear levelling that fragment the drive which reduces performance.
Normal defrag tools will make the situation worse, the solution is to erase large blocks of memory which is easiest to do by reformatting periodically.
However, even when running quite slow they are still tremendously fast compared to hard drives.
this technology is improving fast though so expect next years drives to eclipse this years on speed, cost and rated reliability.
 
SSD's are very expensive and I heard they wear out quickly.

In any case there's absolutely no way I'm spending 300 dollars for 80 gigs.

@Nenu: So I wouldn't want to get 640GB hard drives because they use the 330GB platter? (Wait, don't you want smaller platters?)
 
Last edited:
You need to gauge it on the prices of drives where you live and what you want.
The 640GB and 1TB drives with 330GB platters (also quoted as 320GB depends how you measure it) are very cheap and still pretty quick, so if you value cheap storage more than speed they are a good option.
 
I don't use tons of storage and I'm looking for speed. I've seen benchmarks showing that the 640GB WD caviar black is one of the fastest non-raptor drives you can get. They are fairly cheap too. (80 dollars I think)
 
M4573R said:
SSD's are very expensive and I heard they wear out quickly.
Click to expand...
They are expensive, but they don't wear out that fast. According to the documentation I could transfer several gigs per day to my 64 GB G.Skill SSD and it shouldn't wear out for years. The big problem with current SSDs is that they don't handle multiple writes very well. My system with the SSD grinds to a halt while data is being written to the drive. It does get great reads though, hence why I said a regular HDD for the OS and a SSD just for applications you want to load quickly would be an optimal, though expensive, solution at the moment.


What about general use such as boot times, file access, etc.
Click to expand...
In my experience there isn't much advantage with RAID. If you really want to cut boot times/access times you'll want to get a VelociRaptor.

Also, what do you consider a single fast drive?
...
So I wouldn't want to get 640GB hard drives because they use the 330GB platter? (Wait, don't you want smaller platters?)
Click to expand...
The larger (more dense) the platters are, the better. The 640 GB Western Digital AAKS and AALS series drives are an excellent value and get great performance (The AALS has a longer warranty and costs a little more, but performance is about the same). The 1 TB Western Digital Black edition drives are good too.
 
Last edited:
I've been using RAID 0 arrays for my home systems OS & program drives for the last 5 yrs or so without a single issue.... If you store data on there you are just asking for trouble, but so long as you can just reinstall then WTF, go for it.

A pair of short stroked WD6400AAKS is a great, inexpensive, option.
 
I was thinking 3 if I went raid. 2 in raid 0 for OS and games. Then 1 for music, videos, important things, etc.

Could you explain "short stroked". And what is the AAKS?
 
M4573R said:
I was thinking 3 if I went raid. 2 in raid 0 for OS and games. Then 1 for music, videos, important things, etc.

Could you explain "short stroked". And what is the AAKS?
Click to expand...

Western Digital AAKS
Western Digital AALS

As I said before, the difference is the AALS has a better warranty. Performance is about the same.

Short stroking means only using part of the drives for increased performance. A hard drive is a spinning disk, hard drive performance decreases as you go deeper into the drive since the outer edge of a spinning disk moves faster than the inner part.

Here's a graph of the performance of a 640 GB AAKS series drive:
readhdd1iz9.jpg

Notice how the transfer rate decreases significantly and access time increases as you go deeper into the drive. If you only used the first part (maybe the first 30%) of the drive and left the rest unpartitioned you would get better performance. That's the basic idea behind short stoking.

I actually use most of my drive's capacity so its not something I bother with, but if you're looking to maximize performance and don't need all the space its something to try.
 
Ah OK. I've heard of this before, I just hadn't heard it refered to as short stroking. How do I know a hard drive does this when I'm shopping for one?
 
M4573R said:
Ah OK. I've heard of this before, I just hadn't heard it refered to as short stroking. How do I know a hard drive does this when I'm shopping for one?
Click to expand...

No, you just manually partition the first 20% to 25% of the total hard drive space to "short-stroke" a drive.
 
Hm, I heard you can buy hard drives already like that. (same price / half capacity)

Can you tell me of a program that will allow me to partition specific portions of the disk?
 
M4573R said:
Hm, I heard you can buy hard drives already like that. (same price / half capacity)

Can you tell me of a program that will allow me to partition specific portions of the disk?
Click to expand...

I've never heard of hard drives coming pre-partitioned for short-stroking.

GParted is a free and pretty good partitioning app.
 
Danny Bui said:
I've never heard of hard drives coming pre-partitioned for short-stroking.

GParted is a free and pretty good partitioning app.
Click to expand...


maybe not pre-partitioned, but the 80 gig Velociraptor would be an example of that. those having 150 gig partitions, but cut down to 80 and sold that way.
 
It's not rocket science, when you create the RAID partition you just make it smaller..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top