SSD RAID - benefit to games?

[IanM]

Is there any real, justifiable benefit to having SSDs in RAID for games? or can anyone point me toward SSD RAID reviews that compare game load times and smoothness?

I'm thinking it's unnecessary and the perceptible benefit will probably be quite small, but if the drives are cheap enough maybe it is worth doing?

 

[sub.mesa]

Yes, but 90% of all striping RAID are improperly configured so they give virtually no IOps performance benefit.

To make RAID0 fast you need:
- to avoid Windows XP; but focus on Linux/BSD or Win Vista/7 if you can't escape that
- a stripesize of at least 128KiB
- proper alignment with the filesystem/partition and the stripe blocks
- multiple queue I/O
- a proper benchmark (often people benchmark improperly)

Games are low on the queue depth, meaning RAID0 won't add much benefit here. Still a 20% gain is decent and realistic.

 

[IanM]

I'll be using Win 7 with 8GB RAM, so I'm thinking I'm not going to see too many in game, mid level stutters (certainly way better than my old 2GB system) and this is the thing that used to annoy more than level load times. 20% gain with RAID 0 sounds good on paper - but I'm moving up from mechanical HDDs anyway so I'm already getting the biggest leap in performance from that.

I can use two identical OCZ Vertex, but probably I will just stick to my original plan: 1 Vertex as the system drive + 1 lower cost games storage drive.

 

[Impulse]

I wouldn't bother, the number of games that will see a very appreciable boost in load times from even a single SSD isn't huge, let alone two of them in RAID.

Have you looked at OCZ's new Solid 2 line btw? Same controller as the Vertex/Agility line (Indillix's Barefoot) but it uses smaller 34nm flash so they're cheaper, performance should be really close if not identical. I just noticed Newegg has the 120GB version for $285 AR, makes it one of the cheapest SSD out there as far as cost per GB.

Either way, whether you go w/a larger SSD or a smaller one, by using symbolic links you can seamlessly move game install directories on and off the SSD if you want to have whatever you're playing the most on it. It's fairly simple and that way you don't break the existing installs, definitely worth looking into (since you can even use it to piece out individual games off your Steam folder for instance).

 

[IanM]

Have you looked at OCZ's new Solid 2 line btw?

As it happens they were top of my my short list, but I was offered a couple of 120GB Vertexs for a decent price so I grabbed them while I had the chance. I'm not convinced I need them as I only ever have 2-3 games installed at any time, so if I sell those, keep my 60GB Vertex and get a 30GB Solid 2 when (or if) I need it that's probably more than adequate for games.

 

[MrGuvernment]

As said, most games have small files that load, sure maps can be big, but if you play a game long enough most of it is in ram anyways.
i saw 0 load diff going from 3 x 250G drives in raid 0 back to a single drive.

 

[DD_nVidia]

RAID 0 would be a waste of time just for games.

SSD's don't have any impact on the FPS within the game, only loading times. And really, even if its as much as 30-60 seconds for a map to load, its hardly an eternity. Spend more money on the graphics card tbh.