What RAID can and cannot do (straight talk on RAID's limitations/pitfalls)

tuskenraider said:
What I found interesting in the Anandtech articles, that I missed before, was that the games were loaded on separate(the tested) drives while the OS stayed on another. Who the hell does that? And may explain why they don't get any improvement as most people see when the have the OS/apps/games on the same drive/RAID0 setup.
Good observation.
Please weigh in on my upcoming comparison
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1123655
 
EnderW said:
Great links, thanks EnderW

I think this quote from the Anandtech review makes the point very well. Not everyone is willing to accept it, but I'll present it here none the less.

Anandtech said:
The WD Raptor continues its pattern of being the best available drive for the game enthusiast, although with a limited storage capacity it is certainly an expensive proposition for the general desktop user who typically will sacrifice speed for storage. RAID 0 finally shows up to the party and offers a 7% improvement in the Battlefield 2 scores but otherwise does not offer any tangible benefits, and it even posts slower load times in the Oblivion and Half Life 2 benchmarks. The Seagate 7200.10 does show improvements over the 7200.9 series and is competitive with the WD RE2 500GB drive these benchmarks.

Personally I run a single Raptor 160 (dell spec'd) and I'm thrilled with the performance. Anything important is backed up to a RAID 5 array on a server I own, off-site backup on a webserver and \ or stored on removeable media (cd\dvd\usb).
 
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