RAID question

[slick2004]

Will setting up a RAID improve my performance playing games?? Im running a x2 6400, 2gb of ram, 8800gt , 80gb wd hd, ive been told that my single HD is bottlenecking me a little....

 

[MarcVenice]

You 'MIGHT' see improvements in load times, but there won't be any difference in actual FPS. Getting a raptor, or a high density HD like a 750gb one, will probably give the same boost in load times. It will be less troublesome as well.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

What will you be using to create the RAID array (hardware wise)? Most likely, you won't notice a difference in games though. Going from a Western Digital 160gb 7200rpm drive to two 150gb Raptors in RAID 0 on my Areca controller made no difference in any games that I could notice. I keep my games on the RAID 0 array because I don't think it is going to be slower than a single drive, and the array is there.

 

[Roguestar]

Originally posted by: AnandTech HD Review
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast loading times
The results speak for themselves with the RAID 0 setups offering extremely minor performance improvements in actual game load testing. You will likely not be able to notice any differences during actual game play with a RAID 0 setup. We know it was impossible for us.

BF2 Daqing Oilfields loading times
Once again we see a minimal difference between our RAID 0 and single drive configurations in this benchmark with only a one second difference in load times. In repeated testing it was difficult to discern any differences between the RAID 0 and single drive setups.

Nero Recoding
If you do a lot of video encoding then RAID 0 could end up saving you some precious minutes each day. Is it worth the cost or effort? Probably not, but it is one area besides benchmarking where RAID 0 actually made a difference. Of course, if you don't already have the fastest CPU for encoding available, that would have a far greater impact than RAID 0.

File Copying
We finish our tests with a benchmark that should have favored the RAID 0 setups due to a pure write scenario. Unlike our iPeak test (and for that matter a similar test in PCMark05) where the largest differences in scores between setups were generated, we have RAID 0 making no difference in this test and actually scoring worse than a single drive setup in two instances.

Final Thoughts
If it is not obvious by now, RAID 0 will provide outstanding results in synthetic benchmarks but really does nothing in actual applications.
RAID 0 sounds impressive in a system configuration and provides a performance placebo effect when viewing synthetic benchmarks. However, RAID 0 is just not worth the trouble or cost for the average desktop user or gamer, especially with the software RAID capabilities included on most motherboards.

raid0.txt strikes again :thumbsup:

Edit:

Originally posted by: slick2004
Will setting up a RAID improve my performance playing games?? Im running a x2 6400, 2gb of ram, 8800gt , 80gb wd hd, ive been told that my single HD is bottlenecking me a little....

Aside from what you've been told, are you experiencing any performance degredation? Have you noticed anything slowing down or being anything other than smooth, which is what your current hardware screams? You could invest in another 2GB of RAM, but you'll only see 1.25GB of it unless you're running Vista X64. (Though at the current prices of RAM that's still a great deal) You could also overclock your graphics card and CPU if you wanted.

 

[MichaelD]

Ah, the old "AID0" debate. (There's no redundancy, ergo, no "R").

For years now, with first IDE then SCSI and now SATA Hardware RAID I have seen quite a difference in game load level times. I used to have two 15K rpm SCSI drives striped on a U320 controller and it absolutely screamed.

To be very recent, in Hellgate:London, level load times were literally cut in HALF. This is with two 500GB Samsung SATA drives on a 3Ware9650SE controller.

My recent from-scratch reinstall of WinXP results in the desktop coming up roughly 6-7 seconds faster over a single drive. Big diff? Not at all. Do I like it? YEP. 😀

Will you see a difference in loading Word, Internet Explorer or Messenger? Nope; their files are too small. But big files you will notice a difference.

YES; I've read the AT reports and every other site's as well. My personal experiences are quite to the contrary to those sites.

That said; I've always had a fast system with a lot of memory. If you have a RAID0 stripe and 256MB of RAM, you're not going to see any difference.

Now, working with video files, you will see a huge difference in read/write times. When loading a 10GB file into Sony Vegas, that RAID0 stripe will definitely make a difference.

In summary, I'll say this to the OP: All you lose is that extra HD you'll have to buy. Buy the other drive, create a RAID0 stripe, make separate partitions for your OS and Games and give it a shot. If you don't like it, reformat to a single HD and use the other for storage. I think you'll see a difference though. 🙂

 

[Roguestar]

Originally posted by: MichaelD
Ah, the old "AID0" debate. (There's no redundancy, ergo, no "R").

Hah, that's a fantastic pun 😀

 

[slick2004]

would 1 wd raptor be better than the RAID? (for games)

 

[DSF]

Originally posted by: slick2004
would 1 wd raptor be better than the RAID? (for games)

It would most likely be better than 2 80GB hard drives in RAID, yes. But for the money the Raptor costs you could get a 750GB drive with nearly the same performance and 5 times the capacity.