How much faster is RAID 0?

[ShawnD1]

How much faster is a RAID 0 setup, as a percentage? If I used 7200RPM, 8MB cache drives, would there be any bottleneck with either IDE 133 or SATA?

 

[oldman420]

raid 0 will be about 80-90 percent better than a single drive. you have data coming off of 2 drives instead of one. as for IDE vs. SATA, I would only use a wd drive with their cable clamp harness device on the back. SIIG chipsets onboard still need work and PCI cards work ok if you have a slot to put it in.
with two raptors running raid 0 I was getting 100 meg/sec off the raid.
I hear the new raptors are even better just watch the connectors they suck and break easily

 

[gsellis]

I have seen it about 50% faster on large data writes, but no increase or marginally faster/slower on some small file I/O stuff. It just depends on what you are doing.

 

[Pariah]

Storage review ran some tests a while back, and found the increase to be about 10% in application performance. Of course the type of applications you run will affect how much of an increase you will see. Could be anywhere from 0% to near 100% depending on usage. For most people the 10% estimate is probably pretty accurate.

How much faster than a single drive is a RAID 0 array?

 

[StrangerGuy]

So is it worth the trouble to set up a RAID array?

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: StrangerGuy
So is it worth the trouble to set up a RAID array?

Don't know. What do you do on your computer? I do video editing, animation, and audio work for the video editing. It is worth it to me. What do you do with yours?

 

[Cheetah8799]

So is it worth the trouble to set up a RAID array?

Trouble? no trouble, it's actually pretty easy to do. There is a bit of cost though. If you already have the hard drives, and only need a raid controller, I say go for it. If however you don't have any of the required hardware, and maybe don't *need* the extra hard drive speed, then maybe you shouldn't invest in the hardware.

I setup RAID 0 in my gaming rig to help with the load time of games, and copying/moving files. I do a bit of DVD stuff as well. I think the extra speed has helped. It's hard to say exactly how much it has improved though. I don't think boot time or general Windows application load time has improved much though.

My setup:
Promise FastTrak100 TX2 ATA100 raid controller.
2 x Seagate 7200.7 80gb 2mb cache ATA100 hard drives.

I know there are faster drives, but I chose these because they are fast, yet also quiet. There is an 8mb version, but it is quite a bit more money right now than the 2mb version...