Raid good or bad for a mainly gaming/surfing compter

[cosmo72]

Should I get a MB for the 133 chipset with onboard Raid for a computer that will be mainly used for gaming/surfing and some webpage work(graphics) for my personal web page.

Thanks
Cosmo

 

[Verygreedy]

yeah why not. RAID is faster! 😉

 

[mlg]

Have you looked at www.realworldtech.com ? There's an article on RAID there. Remember, two HD's double the chance that one of them will fail, and two HD will always cost more than one. Do you need more than 60Gb of HD? If you're into gaming and surfing, then spending that money on more RAM, or a faster CPU, or a better monitor, would probably be better.

 

[Vegito]

if I found the right article or not...

This was a tough one. After my ATA/100 article was published (ATA/100 - Real Performance or Marketing Hype?) there were a number of questions from readers asking about IDE RAID 0 (Striping) performance and whether there is any advantage of ATA/100 over ATA/66 when using RAID 0. I suspect that some readers felt that due to two drives being able to burst small amounts of data at high speed, you would see a difference with the higher ATA mode when two or more ATA/100 drives were combined into an array. What made it tough was not only figuring out what to test and how to test it, but at the same time I had to make sure I didn?t fall into a trap. What ?trap? you ask? One that anyone testing system performance can fall into: picking the benchmark(s) to prove your point (and that point can be either something that does or does not give a gain). It also took a fair amount of time because every time the drive mode was changed I had to re-install Windows.

The article is mainly on stripping raid 0, which isn't even raid because raid 0 is not raid by definition.

RAID 1+ is real raid, other wise, it's just throwing 2 drive together as 1 big drive..

Only benefit of IDE raid is mirroring since you can only have so many HDDs in a ide system and there isn't much raid 5 arounds..

The only reason you mirror is because if 1 drive dies, the other MIGHT still be good so you either go buy a new HD today or backup that good drive before going on.

You can use stripping for games and crap but like mlg said, double your hd failing... one drive die, both drive dies in a raid 0 which isn't raid, just stripping..

 

[RickH]

RAID will be of no use to you or 99% of the people on this form. If you?re concerned about data backup do it on a tape or CD, removed from the machine, stored in a safe place. RAID is only useful when you need to have huge amounts of data instantly accessible. Who needs multiple 60-80 GB drives on a home computer? It is just added expense and added problems. R.

 

[reicherb]

I have the Abit KT7 and 2 IBM 45GB hard drives in RAID 0 and can tell almost no difference from non-RAID. It is however cool to say you have RAID.

 

[YZ12569]

RickH I disagree with you strongly...
I do digital video editing at home just for fun and I would hate to loose all of my pictures and videos because of a bad HDD. Mirroring is an instant and excellent backup.
Who wants to dick around with a slow tape drive when you can use RAID.
I also disagree with the added problems bit. I have two computers running RAID and have never had a problem with the technology. If it was a problamatic technology high-end servers would not use it.

Sorry had to vent.

 

[Homerboy]

I was running a RAID mirror set up at home and I still lost everything. From what I can divulge, it seems that some "bad info" (maybe on MBR? Does RAID mirror MBR info too?) got mirroed from drive a to drive b rending them both un-partitioned and basically uselss until I fdisked/formatted.

My new choice fo backup isn't tape, isn't RAID, but s simply "online backup"
I run a small p200 machine (win2k) in the basement) that NIGHTLY copies and backups up the directories I tell it to.

I have it set up so "exact" that it copies over basically everything that I have edited or could edit in a given day. ie: DV-video files, mp3s, saved games, quicken accounts, you name it. It copies over only the new/edited files and it's seemless.... the nice thing about this is if in a given day I accidentally edit and save a file that I shouldn;t ahve (or delete) the old backup verision is only a mapped HD away.

 

[RickH]

It's a mechanical device that used magnetic media. I wouldn't bet the farm on it not failing. We have all had new drives fail in a short time and some old piece of junk drive what just won't die. You never know. RAID is not really a perminate back up, it's more of a way to have large amounts of data available so you can work with it, and then store it remotely. R.