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Need advice on RAID setup

B

beamerxl

Junior Member
ok, keep in mind during this post that i'm a gamer, if that affects anything.

i'm building a new rig with RAID-0, and i plan on having a third stand-alone drive. i originally planned to have that third drive for Windows XP and any files that i don't really need to access lightning fast with RAID.

ok, first of all, does that make sense to put the OS on the non-RAID drive? it seemed like a good idea at the time (for stability and security purposes, and so if i have to reinstall windows it wont mess with my RAID drives). but would it actually be smarter to put the OS on my RAID drives to speed up performance since the OS will obviously be accessed quite a bit?

and my second question is in regards to which drives to buy. a lot have people have recommended dual WD Raptor 74 GB 10,000 RPM drives for the RAID. and i was thinking about getting a WD 80 GB 7200 RPM SATA drive for my third drive. i read somewhere though that putting the two 10,000 RPM drives in RAID-0 doesn't improve performance much since those drives are already fast. would it be smarter to put two of the 7200 drives in the RAID and just get a single 10,000 RPM Raptor for my stand-alone drive? it would be cheaper of course, but does it make more sense as far as getting the most out of my RAID?

thanks for your help
 
The only way you'll see a performance increase on dual Raptors is if you've got PCI64, PCI-X, or onchipset (Not onboard, think i875) SATA RAID. Regular PCI bus tops out at ~100MB/sec after overhead. You'd see an increase in sustained transfers, but bursts is what gives you a sense of "speed". Sustained is only useful if you move large data around A LOT. Like multitrack audio editing, DVD editing, etc.

If you have to ask about RAID, it's probably a waste of money for your application. Of course, if you want to play around with it I certainly won't discourage you from it. I love to play with hardware. I've got a RAID0 4 drive stripe and a RAID5 3 drive. It's completely overkill though. I don't need it.
 
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