Hard drive question

[deamer44]

Hey everyone back again, i'm wondering if having two hard drives in RAID 0 will improve the speed of windows, as I have heard that that hard drives are the main bottleneck.

 

[Bored SysAdmin]

Having two hard drives in Raid 0 will certainly make windows faster , but also double the chance of crash, if one of drives fail - you loose everything. Unfortunately since your motherboard is Nforce 650i based, you do not have option for Raid matrix.
I'd recommend to dedicate single 10k rpm drive even as small as 74Gb to have windows on, and rest 2x 750Gb drives in raid 0.

 

[GarfieldtheCat]

Not really....RAID 0 mostly helps STR (sustained transfer rate). Most of what people do involves opening/closing a bunch of small files, so RAID 0 doesn't really give hardly any benefit. Plus, like BSA said, it doubles your chance of data loss. RAID 0 is more for video editing, where you have big files to deal with.

Get a new WD 640gig or Samsung F1 1tb, that will be the best cost effective upgrade. OR get the $300 VRaptor, it's the fastest HD right now. (the WD and Samsung are ~10% slower, and 1/3 -1/2 the price)

 

[Bored SysAdmin]

after additional research I found single 10k RPM drive boots windows faster than 2x raid 0 drives... hmm... however some windows operations could include sustained disk reads/writes. Raid 0 helps a lot in game load times. Anything related video file processing will also get big help from raid 0 setup.

 

[DSF]

Originally posted by: Bored SysAdmin
after additional research I found single 10k RPM drive boots windows faster than 2x raid 0 drives... hmm... however some windows operations could include sustained disk reads/writes. Raid 0 helps a lot in game load times. Anything related video file processing will also get big help from raid 0 setup.

Actually, RAID 0 does surprisingly little to improve game load times. Anandtech has done more than one article on the subject. RAID 0 is generally going to be underwhelming in a desktop PC, especially with only two drives in the array being run off of an integrated controller.

 

[tallman45]

Raid 0 Shines when using large files, small file access such as an OS is actually slower on a Raid 0.

There are a few reasons why, well documents all over the web

Get a fast drive dedicated solely to your OS, either Raptor, or get a WD 640GB ( create a 60gb os Partition) leave the rest for archives