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what is the best HDD setup for gaming? Raid/No Raid?

C

cpush

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 12, 2005
Messages
173
hey guys Im a CS:S player and was wondering what hdd setup would give me the best speed/performance. Will having just 1 sata2 8mb cache 7200 rpm drive be good, or would a raid be better? and if so which raid and why? thanks
 
No RAID; the gains for gaming are negligable at best, non-existant at worst
Just do a search for RAID-0 in this sub-forum and you'll find this issue has been beat to death
 
There are only a handful of games out there where RAID will show any benefit. It might help with CS:S but i'm not positive. The game needs to load all of the data at once for it to really make a difference. On top of that it's only going to increase loading speed of levels, it won't have any effect on your FPS. Back in CS 1.5 I used to be able to load levels extrememly fast, I'd be running circles in the level waiting for a second person to get in on a 20+ person server. Then something changed in 1.6 where I couldn't load them nearly as fast and I can't imagine the problem has gotten any better.
 
Right now, the WD740GD (73GB Raptor) teamed up with the largest 16MB buffer Maxtor drive you can afford is a very popular setup. It gives you the best in ATA performance of the Raptor, coupled with plenty of cheap capacity from a best in class 7200RPM drive. Hard to go wrong with it. Hitachi's 7200RPM drives are pretty zippy as well, and can be had at a great price - 160GB SATA drives are below $90, and 250GB drives below $125. It's a definitely a great time to be buying. Also, don't forget about Seagate - their super dense 133GB platters have allowed them to stay competitive on price while using the quality components and assembly to keep them confident in their five year warranty. My point? There's plenty of great drives out there. For performance, 73GB Raptor comes first, then 16MB buffer Maxtors, then Hitachi (T)7K250, then most of the other drives are pretty well bunched up, but not far behind.
 
I think lots of people like to run raid 0 to say they have a raid. (Technically, raid requires at least 3 drives, so striping 2 drives is not technically raid but we'll ignore that for now.) Yes it can improve transfer rates, but can lower seek times. So it you're doing sustained writes or reads, (ie. larger files) then it works great, but for random reads / writes, it kinda sucks and can actually be slower.

I agree with douglite that your best bet would be a good SATA with a 16mb cache, or (which I really advise against, but is very popular) get a Raptor as a boot drive and another sata for cheap storage.
 
All performance aside, going RAID1 is a cheap way to avoid the hours of trying to recover your system when you have a HDD failure requiring a rebuild. Now, if you have the cash/hardware to do nightly backups and/or system images, then there's probably not as much utility for you.

From personal experience, for games that load tons of textures like EQ2/WoW/DAoC, load times into zones were faster on RAID0 volumes than on non-RAID0 volumes. It wasn't a huge margin, but when you add up all the loading over a several hour period multiplied by how many days a week you play, it adds up. It mostly just reduces the frustration of "g-d damn it, why is this taking so freaking long to load?!".
 
It depends on the game.

There are games, for example Combat Mission and many other wargames, which don't have any form of *.pak file and have each texture in its own file. That is a lot of individual files it load on startup.

In such cases a RAID-0 setup will greatly speed up loading.

If you don't have quite enough RAM than swap paritions/files that are distributed over all drives are a huge advantage. You don't need RAID-0 on the filesystem level for that, though, multiple swap partitions/files are always RAID-0, so to speak.

BTW, is it just my box or does Far Cry have insane load times and quite a bit of pauses during gameplay to load new stuff?
 
The FarCry issue you're seeing is more likely related to loading new textures/models onto the actual video card than actually having slower HD speeds. HD speed could play a part but it's more than likely just swapping between the card and system memory.
 
it seems raid 0 is faster for me...now bear with me

i had two 74gb raptors, and a talon controller. running in raid 0.
problem was i had 2 different revisions A0/A1 and it appeared faster, but for the most part it seemed slower to load levels in BF2

when i finally figured out the revison fiasco and i RMA'd my drives i had to run on an older seagate 80GB for a few days untill the drives arrived..and call me crazy but it seemed that it loaded BF2 faster...insane. i benched the drive, bursting around 90something, and sustained at 50. not too impressive.

got my replacement drives, and now runnin my raid stripe with 2 A1 revisions

and i can definatly say its faster than the seagate, and when i had mismatched revisions. BF2 level loading is snappy! and benching the drive, it bursts around 110, and suystained is hovering around the 80 to 90mark.

so benches see an improvement, i see an improivement in level loading. as well

my point? bah i dunno. but yea it seems faster now than it was b4 when i had the seagate, or the mismatched raptor revisions in a raid.
 
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