RAID0 - How Do You Have Yours

[jellybeard999]

Im setting up my HDDs in RAID0 (Sammys in sig) and wondered - what cluster size etc is best to use / do u use

I want fast loading mainly... OS and games

What do u recommend ?

Any comparison charts for load times, transfer speeds etc ?

Thanks

 

[M8tRiX]

Not worth it on a desktop machine, it's a i've got a faster car than yours senario.

You would be better of getting sata-2 hard drives as they would load games etc just of fast if not faster than on-board raid.

Proper RAID with SCSI disks is faster with dedicated controllers with on-board memory for data caching etc, on-board controllers are very poor imho.

Hope that sheds light on on-board raid, sorry if this is seen as a negative response.

 

[jellybeard999]

Yeah, but i did have em raided at one point, and load times WERE faster...

Onboard controller etc.. BUT dont know how to set em up tbh... i just used defaults

No data is important on this machine, so i may as well do it...

 

[maverik-sg1]

Stick to Stripe on Optimum set-up (64k stripe size) although ifg you are video encoding they benefit for more and for benchmarking they benefit being 32k in size - 64k is the best for overall performance.

RAID is a great set-up to have - but is not essential.

Works especially well with 2x74GB Raptors

 

[Thickbrit]

I use 2x37k raptors with 32k.

 

[dkdexter]

Stripe is a very bad idea, because if one of the drives blows then you can wave goodbye to the other drives in your setup

 

[GoLLuM4444]

Works especially well with 2x74GB Raptors

"I like mine 2 at a time" - just to carry on the mini egg theme of the thread.

 

[Master_G]

Good articles from storagereview:

http://faq.storagereview.com/SingleDriveVsRaid0

http://www.storagereview.com/php/cms/cms.php?loc=news_content&id=970&start=6&range=10

Anandtech RAID 0 article:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=2101

Conclusion: RAID 0 actually has a very limited impact in real world situations.

G

 

[jellybeard999]

I actually find RAID0 does really help loading times and file moving quite a bit, maybe its not RAID, but i CAN notice a difference, the files arent too important (have a diff rig for bakcups and important stuff - whihc is also put on DVD) - just games, OS and a bit of software... long and short - i have the pair of drives, i have the ability, files arent important, it goes faster - so why not raid ?

thanks for the help, ill go for 32kb now (on 64 atm) and see which i prefer - gotta format anywho - dual xp and 64 boot - both nlited

 

[ZaX]

Yeah some peeps seem to think Raid 0 gives you a minimal performance increase, custom pc had an article on it a while back. From my experience (and benchies) the thing flies, windows is up in the time it takes that bar thingy to move across once :O I'll never look back from Raid 0 for the OS as for the important data just stick it on a non raided drive. Oh 32k stripe sizes on mine.

 

[jellybeard999]

well 32k didnt want to work, so ive gone with 64k again 8)

anyway, i get 86mbs in SiSoft 05, which beats their 2 x 7.2k SATA150 HDDs so im happy

 

[Drazic]

I'm just about to go RAID 0, well once i get a 2nd HD, hoping there is some going in the forsale bit of this forum, nearly enough posts to get there. I though you just plug em in and and as you instal windows xp you do the F6 option and wack in the flopy for raid drivers...