Onboard SATA RAID - is it worth using?

[Zim]

I have an Hitachi 160GB SATA/150 hard drive as my primary boot drive. If I add another one of these and make a RAID 0 pair, and using my motherboard's onboard SATA RAID, will I see a significant performance increase in disk usage?

 

[mamisano]

First, you would need to reformat the current 160 to add it to the Raid 0 Array. Second, I don't think the gains would be very noticable. The best bet would be to have 2 drives, one for OS and swap, second for applications. This seems to be the best setup.

 

[Zim]

Originally posted by: mamisano
First, you would need to reformat the current 160 to add it to the Raid 0 Array. Second, I don't think the gains would be very noticable. The best bet would be to have 2 drives, one for OS and swap, second for applications. This seems to be the best setup.

Thanks. That' what I thought might be the case.

 

[Canterwood]

I'm using a Raid 0 setup on my current rig. (Couple of crappy 80gb maxtor's)

Whilst there are risks associated with Raid 0, I still find there's a decent (but not huge) performance increase.

Win2K startup is noticably quicker with this setup. I use a smallish system partiton for OS, then the rest of the stripe set for data.
It works for me, but each to his own.

I do backup regularly too, just in case.