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RAID0 or Separate Drives? Performance

WishRyder

n00b
Joined
Aug 7, 2004
Messages
2
First and foremost, I am a newbie here, but have been browsing the forum for quite some time. That said, I have a performance question for all of you.

I have two options:

Option 1) (and current situation) I have two SATAII drives. My first drive is simply for the OS and basic applications (photoshop/nero/etc). My second drive is for my game installs.

Option 2) Use the two drives in RAID0, but get stuck with the OS and games running off the same RAID.

The question is, would I get better performance leaving the OS and games on seperate drives, or combining the drives in RAID0. I know RAID0 offers performance increase, but will the RAID choke while running the OS and games at the same time from the same relative place?




NOTE: I also have 2 additional drives in my machine used for storage/backups, and also regularly backup data to my fileserver. Data redundancy is not an issue in my scenario.
 
I am not the best at this but, I would sugest leaving them the way they are. Putting them in raid 0 will not have a problem with your OS reading and games reading. But you will probably get better performance with them separate, try tossing your swap file on the other drive if you want some performance improvement. I would not sugest it.

But I am still a noobie.
 
Raid 0 is good for certain things. Most vote against it however. Its faster than a single drive for many things, however depending on what you do you may not notice it. And to most, its not worth the risk of losing all your data, because if 1 drive in the array fails, you lose all your data.

I run a Raid 0 array just because for what I am doing moving large video and audio files alot, its faster :)
 
WishRyder said:
First and foremost, I am a newbie here, but have trolled for quite some time. That said, I have a performance question for all of you..

Bad choice of words...:)...
Anyway, I would leave them as they are, but put your swap file on the other drive.

I have 2 74 GIG Raptors and I run my OS on one and all my apps, games and my swap file on the other...Then I have a storage drive also....

I had them in RAID 0 for a while, and I honestly didnt get enough performance increase to justify the risk of losing my array....
 
Wow...didn't expect such fast responses.

I'm leaning heavily towards keeping separate drives, unless gaming performance is NOTABLY better on RAID0. I don't particularly care about level load times really and I'm not a big frames per second counter either. Playable and futureproof is all I'm aiming for.

Also...I've been a little leery of using RAID since the PII days when my friend's experiment with it went a little bit sour.




Crosshairs said:
WishRyder said:
First and foremost, I am a newbie here, but have trolled for quite some time. That said, I have a performance question for all of you.
Bad choice of words...:)...

haha...yah...i guess trolling wasn't the correct term, since that would imply i've been posting...i have, however, been ?lurking? perhaps? how about I change it to a neutral sounding "browsing".
 
WishRyder said:
Wow...didn't expect such fast responses.

I'm leaning heavily towards keeping separate drives, unless gaming performance is NOTABLY better on RAID0. I don't particularly care about level load times really and I'm not a big frames per second counter either. Playable and futureproof is all I'm aiming for.

Also...I've been a little leery of using RAID since the PII days when my friend's experiment with it went a little bit sour.






haha...yah...i guess trolling wasn't the correct term, since that would imply i've been posting...i have, however, been ?lurking? perhaps? how about I change it to a neutral sounding "browsing".

LOL yeah, lurking or browsing is better.....trolling is a term that implies you ripped someone off ....
Like you post something for sale..I pay and you dont ship..... then you trolled me....Thats a term you wanna stay away from :)

anyway, for gaming and the like, its been said that RAID 0 has little to no advantage over a good single drive...Ive proven it myself on my own rig....I broke up my array, and Im very happy with my single drive performance..and the added security also.
 
If you are looking for faster load times, I would suggest going with raid0 with a smaller block size. However, if one of your drives fails, everything is gone, so be ready ;)
 
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