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Would I benefit much from RAID 0?

O

offtone

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 13, 2005
Messages
205
I'm sort of a gamer, but I spend most of my time at the computer in Photoshop CS and CS2 doing graphic and Web design. I'm reading conflicting opinions on the benefits of RAID 0 when considering its cons, so I figured I'd just ask you folks for advice. I've got a 74GB raptor and I'd be willing to give it some company if I can be sure I'll notice a reasonable performance boost.

Thanks for any advice, and I imagine it'll help a lot of others in making the decision to build a RAID or not.
 
Games: Probably not. Return on investment when running RAID-0 for loading almost any applications is virtually non-existant, often no more than simply moving to a drive that is twice as big and equal in every other attribute. Because of poor coding, many games exhibit loading patterns that are unusally seek heavy, making RAID-0 a poor choice for decreasing application/game load times. If you want faster application loading performance, get a drive with higher density, better seek performance, and a bigger buffer. Increasing STR by running RAID-0 doesn't offset the rotational latency that running multiple spindles adds.

Photoshop etc.: Probably. The best photoshop arrangement is to have one drive for Windows and the actual application executables/libraries/etc, then another set of drive(s) for storing and working with the data. RAID-0 works well in this latter role, especially if you save and load frequently. 7200RPM drives of high density in RAID-0 (The 160GB 'Cuda 7200.9s, Hitachi T7K250, and Maxtor DM10/MLIII come to mind here) will actually deliver higher throughput for saving and loading artwork like that than your Raptor ever could hope to alone, for about the same cost as a single Raptor. A "scratch array" like this scales very well with RAID-0, as there are many long transfers and relatively few seeks in such work.

However, when running RAID-0 to increase content creation throughput, it pays to make on-the-fly copies of what you are working on to your main system drive, so you have a readily available backup in case your RAID array develops an issue or fails. Also, off-site backups are a must for any data that you aren't willing to lose to a fire/flood/theft/catastrophic hardware failure.
 
Hmm. Maybe I'll just use the system (it's new, and I haven't built it yet) and save the RAID0 for a later upgrade or something.

That's odd though. Two 7200 RPM Seagates would outperform two 10,000 RPM Raptors in RAID0? At least in the case of Photoshop use? Maybe I'm confused there. Heh.

Thanks for the info. It's much appreciated.
 
offtone said:
Hmm. Maybe I'll just use the system (it's new, and I haven't built it yet) and save the RAID0 for a later upgrade or something.

That's odd though. Two 7200 RPM Seagates would outperform two 10,000 RPM Raptors in RAID0? At least in the case of Photoshop use? Maybe I'm confused there. Heh.

Thanks for the info. It's much appreciated.
Click to expand...
No, two high quality and high density 7200RPM drives would outperform a single Raptor, in terms of raw sequential transfer rate, for about the same cost, while achieving a much higher capacity.
 
offtone said:
Hmm. Maybe I'll just use the system (it's new, and I haven't built it yet) and save the RAID0 for a later upgrade or something.

That's odd though. Two 7200 RPM Seagates would outperform two 10,000 RPM Raptors in RAID0? At least in the case of Photoshop use? Maybe I'm confused there. Heh.

Thanks for the info. It's much appreciated.
Click to expand...
You misunderstood, DL suggested a total of 3 drives, 1 for OS and Applications data and a RAID-0 array as a scratchdisk.
 
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