raid 0 for video editing/encoding

[Mellman]

Working with HD streams, and I was wondering how much a raid 0 setup would actually affect my performance. I was just thinking of grabbing a 4 port sata raid card to raid 0 some drives.

Option 1: raid my 3x320gb seagate sataII drives
Option 2: grab another 74gb raptor and raid 0 two of them for my os and only use it as a swap(yes i know not efficient)
Option 3: I wont feel a performance gain

I'm looking for faster read/write times...and these files do not need redundancy. I only need speed. I have a 2TB raid 5 array for the redundancy part.

I just don't know how much faster a raid 0 setup would be considering its only sata drives, and not an enterprise level scsi setup.

Ive determined its my disk thats slowing me down on this process vs my cpu so Thats my next problem to tackle.

Thoughts?
Thanks.

 

[dBTelos]

You will get a benifit from RAID 0 if you just want faster timings. I like 'Option 1' personally.

 

[Mellman]

yeah i just want faster read/write speeds really

 

[dBTelos]

Option 1 should work best for you.

 

[Madwand1]

For straight-ahead sequential reads and writes (large file transfers), if you stripe the array well, you should get a decent fraction of a single drive's rate multiplied by the number of drives.

Here's an illustration of similar drives single vs. 2x RAID 0 (stripe size = 32K), showing near-perfect scaling.

http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k203/Madwand0/single-drive-vs-2.jpg