Raid 0 - Game Load Times

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beriahthebee

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Sep 4, 2007
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So I built a three computers some time back for me and my two sons.

Core i3-2100
8GB RAM
ASRock P67 EXTREME4 GEN3
Nvidia 570 GTX
WD Black 500GB

My machine I had 2 WD Black in Raid 0

My experience has been interesting in regards to game load times.

In most games my boys would load into zones/sections/levels/etc faster than I would with my Raid 0

HD Tach shows that my I/O throughput is far superior, but it seems not all games benefit from this.

Has anyone else found this to be true?
 
I believe access time increases when you raid, at least with HDDs, so while transfer speeds may be faster, it takes longer to access files.
 
What games?

One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of game load time is CPU time--almost all game levels/maps are compressed files on your disk, and loading a level has a lot of CPU-decompression which makes level load time a generally CPU-bound operation. I would guess that you're running on-board RAID?

On-board raid, which uses the system CPU to manage, can have 10-20% CPU overhead--so you could be losing a significant amount of CPU cycles for RAID management, which would further reduce your performance which would explain your situation.

I bet if you overclocked your CPU (if possible, that is), you'd notice load times decrease with increased clock speed. Or if you went to a physical quad core (vs. a HT dual), you'd also probably notice an increase. But RAID0 probably not since the decompression is the bottleneck, not how fast the data can be read from the HDD.
 
beriahthebee said:
Has anyone else found this to be true?
Click to expand...

I ran a RAID 0 setup for a while, way back when it was new and everyone was saying how great it was. After I actually started doing some real world tests, I found that in pretty much every situation it was slower and stopped using it.
 
beriahthebee said:
So I built a three computers some time back for me and my two sons.

Core i3-2100
8GB RAM
ASRock P67 EXTREME4 GEN3
Nvidia 570 GTX
WD Black 500GB

My machine I had 2 WD Black in Raid 0

My experience has been interesting in regards to game load times.

In most games my boys would load into zones/sections/levels/etc faster than I would with my Raid 0

HD Tach shows that my I/O throughput is far superior, but it seems not all games benefit from this.

Has anyone else found this to be true?
Click to expand...
RAID 0 will give you faster sequential reads and fastered queued depth random reads, but for most games you don't need high sequential reads, random reads are more important, which RAID suffers unless you have a very high end array. The same thing happens with RAID 0 SSD's, single drives are all around better for applications unless you need the high end sequential read speeds, which for games and applications you do not.

RAID is really misunderstood technology. People see the huge synthetic marks and think that's going to translate to everything you do on a computer. It does not.
 
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