Raid 0 for main drive volume.

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Limp Gawd
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Anyone use a SATA Raid 0 for a main drive? How much performance gain is there over a single drive? I have a 80 GB Sata main drive now 7200 rpm 8mb cache. Just curious to see if there is a big difference. Thanks.
 
Big difference? No. Don't get RAID 0 and expect it to double your load times or anything like that. Noticable difference? Sure, but just depends on how grainular you are getting.
 
Thing is I already have a SATA raid controller onboard and a extra 80 GB SATA hd. So I would not have to purchase anything. I guess I should clarify a little. I mostly do light gaming but more on the multimedia side as far as video and audio encoding and editing. Would I see a performance gain there or would I be better off getting a hard drive with a larger cache and faster RPM like a Raptor. Thanks.
 
Video editing can see quite a big improvement. Although you may be able to get similar results if you have the source material on one drive and the destination being output to the second drive.
 
I use it for my main system, and I do notice a speed increase for "day to day" use, I'm using two cheap Seagates and they blast my other system's single 74GB 8MB Raptor in burst rates and sustained read/writes. But! Random access is about half the Raptor.

The biggest things you will see if some larger HDD intensive apps and games can load faster, but other than that... No difference.
 
Other thing to consider is you double your risk of data loss since if either of the drives goes down you will corrupt your data on the array.

Thats why (at least IMO), it is smarter to do a single good drive (or high speed drive like a raptor) vs. raid 0 unless it is really necessary.

and no I dont think it is necessary for gaming....I beat almost everyone, if not everyone into the game on HL:2, BF2, BF2142, and other games with my single Raptor X drive.
 
RAID 0 = not worth the effort!

I had RAID 0 for almost 5-yrs. Works fine, until you update your machine. Onboard RAID controllers are the worst for that. Unless your new MB had EXACTLY the same chip, forget it. A standalone card has a better chance of migrating. Believe me, I went through that, got lucky once, then had to reformat and went to a separate RAID card. Then came the dreaded HD failure (me with no backup!). After that hassle for minimal performance increase I swore off RAID for now.
 
As most people have said, setting up raid0 really depends on what you do most often.
I've been using raid0 as my OS drive for a few years and just lately dropped it. Now I use it as my storage drive.

Honestly, the differences I see are negligable. I do notice it a bit when tranferring a large amount of files. So generally, from my experience - I break it down like this.

Raid0 if

• You constantly move a large amount of files from drive to drive or within the same drive.
• You're into some serious video encoding/editing.
• You don't mind squeezing every bit from your hard drives, which in real world terms isn't much - even at a large cost to data loss.

It doesn't hurt to try it out if you're curious. But I don't think it's worth it for the majority of general users. In my opinion, as long as you have a competent backup plan available - it is better off having the OS on a fast single drive and having the raid as a drive with the paging partition located on the outer tracks then the application cache partition and finally whatever storage partition.

Just my 2 cents.
 
Well, I have two 80GB drives and onboard SIL3113 sata raid, I also have two sis sata ports. I also have a 160 GB sata drive. I thought of making a raid 0 and the ghosting the volume to the 160gb single drive and experiment with the speed. I can aslways go back to a single drive without losing my data. I think I will try it. thanks for the input.
 
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