Is the Performance Increase from RAID Worth a $200 Upgrade?

[rpr]

I've never tried a RAID setup before. I'm getting nervous about my 75GXP drive (my system has always been a bit flakey with this drive), so I'm thinking about picking up a Maxtor. As long as I'm in the market, I'm considering picking up 2 Maxtor drives to take advantage of RAID0 on my A7V133 board.

I have no clue what to expect in terms of a performance increase using RAID0. Any advice? Is it worth it, or would it be more bang for the buck to ditch my A7V133 for a board with a KT266a chipset like the Epox 8KHA+ or the ABIT KR7A+???

 

[MustPost]

I would say that it is not worth 200 dollars for an IDE RAID. it doesn't give you that much of a speed boost.
SCSI raids are worth the money, but IDE will give you a minimal permormance increase.

 

[WHipLAsh13]

I disagree. I ran a test in sandra on my Raid 0 setup using 2 IBM 60GXP's. According to Sandra 2001 a UDMA 100 7200 RPM drive tests out at 24000. A standard raid 0 setup with a pair of that same drive tests at 36300. My raid 0 with the IBM's tested at 48136. This was not a mistake either. I ran the test several times with very similar results within +/- 100 each time. Now I am not saying that a raid 0 array is twice as fast as a single drive but there is obviously a significant increase in performance.

 

[BD231]

Unless your working with extreemly large files quite often, IDE RAID isent worth the extra money