Is RAID needed?

[stuman19]

I am just wondering if there is a big advantage in raiding IDE drives? ATA 133 it would be RAID 1 striping. I am a gamer and would require fast hard drive access, but would it make that big of a difference without RAID? Will Serial ATA be better then the RAID or faster? Any imput would be sweet! Thanks.

Stu

 

[LED]

RAID0=Striping (faster then Current Single SATA)...RAID1= Mirroring (slower but more secure)... and SATA will be available and faster in RAID

 

[warrenpeace]

I had an 80 gig western digital ata100 special edition (8mb buffer) drive, and it gave great performance. It scored reughly 3600 in SANDRA 2002 storage benchmark, where my 80 gig maxtor with a 2mb buffer, but ata 133 (which isn't that big of a deal over ata100) scored 2500 in sandra.

I just bought another WD 80 gig 8mb ata100 drive two days ago and set them up in a raid 0 array, and loading programs is noticably faster, and it just scored 4600 in sandra.

What the Sandra score means in the real world is up for debate, and i would be the last person to put all my eggs in that basket, but i do notice faster load times on programs i use all the time even if i have not timed them.

 

[Smilin]

The big thing to remember about serial ATA: It will have little impact on the actual speed of the drive. The platter density and spindle speed of the drive are the primary bottlenecks. But, with some mature SATA hardware and drivers we should see some improvments in burst speed and also in simultaneos read/writes (one of the weak links of ATA as a whole).

Raid 0 (striping) pretty much does as advertised: it will nearly double the speed of your drives.

Remember also, Raid 1 (mirroring) offers read performance benifits, just not write.