So is Serial ATA Raid 0 worth it?

[Rand3000]

So what's the deal on SATA Raid 0? I read the article on Anandtech that said there isn't really a perfomance improvement with it; however, I have friends who say that they are seeing a big performance improvement with Raid 0. One friend said that his Win XP load time with just a single SATA drive was 30 seconds and then it dropped to 15 seconds when he put in a second drive and did Raid 0. I need to get a new hard drive and I'm just trying to figure out if I should do a single big SATA drive or two smaller SATA drives and do Raid 0. Thanks.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Whatever performance boost you might see isn't worth it because of no mirroring IMO. I used to run RAID0 and it never impressed me, not to mention what happened when I pushed the overclock too hard on the KT333 board it was on; badly corrupted the data and I had to start over. I had it all on backup HDD I kept for the purpose so I didn't lose anything but I'll take reduced storage size in favor of redundancy anytime, especially since storage is cheap per GB now-a-days, just my opinion of course.

 

[ribbon13]

Raid 0 is awesome for professionals, but is a waste of money for the desktop user.

 

[Rand3000]

So here it the type of stuff I do on my computer:

- Play video games
- Video editing, this with the video from my digital camcorder. I'm also encoding the videos and burning them to DVD.
- And then just normal web surfing, email, etc

So will I get much performance improvement with Raid 0 for these tasks? I'm thinking that it would probably help with the video editing (each hr of raw video in AVI is 13 GB) and then I might see some improvement with video games.

 

[ribbon13]

with a 13gb file you would see a marked improvement. depends on the drives and controller.

 

[imported_Mitchell]

Nope, cost to performance ratio just isn't there. Through in reliability and forget it.

 

[caz67]

I have it , but i won't next time i reformat..

 

[Vee]

No. Only RAID worth having is RAID 1. But hds seem to have become a bit more reliable lately, so why bother at all for a common desktop, if you have some backup common sense.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: Rand3000
So here it the type of stuff I do on my computer:

- Play video games
- Video editing, this with the video from my digital camcorder. I'm also encoding the videos and burning them to DVD.
- And then just normal web surfing, email, etc

So will I get much performance improvement with Raid 0 for these tasks? I'm thinking that it would probably help with the video editing (each hr of raw video in AVI is 13 GB) and then I might see some improvement with video games.

Yes you MIGHT see a difference if you move those files around constantly, however playing games and websurfing there will be absolutely no difference.

If you want a speed boost without going to SCSI then get a Raptor (assuming you dont have a M/B that supports Native Command Queuing and SATAII)

-Kevin

 

[aka1nas]

I would reccomend it as a secondary array if you are doing a lot of capture of large video files as it is possible to bog down even a fast single drive if you aren't compressing the video much on fly. You won't notice it much in games except for load times and maybe it will shave a few seconds of your OS load times as well.

 

[Ecgtheow]

If you don't know why you need something, you don't need it.

 

[satiger]

I do have Dell 8400 with SATA RAID 0 and NCQ. I am impressed with its performance. It just took about 90 seconds to install complete MS office 2003, if that can give any sort of indication of performance.

 

[VTrider]

Oh boy here we go again....

Rand3000 - this is all you need to know.

I was in your shoes years ago, asked the same questions - got millions of answers. Most RAID 0 users responded positively and told me to go for it, considering I was planning on doing a lot of video editing work. Many others shook their hands over their heads and warned me:

1) Don't do it! you'll be sorry, your 2x likely to loose your data!
2) No improvements in desktop performance
3) No improvements in games

Well guess what, it's been over 2 years later and:

1) I did it, and I'm glad I did! Haven't lost a single file, and if I do - no problem because just like "NON RAID USERS" we all have a working 7/24 backup solution, right?!
2) Desktop performance 'seems' quicker in certian situations, probably marginal & insignificant if any, but it's not worse. Atleast I can make a 'valid' opinion on it unlike many people who comment on RAID 0 and have never owned/built/used one.
3) Certian maps in games load a hell of a lot faster than my non-raid machines.

So anyway, you do video editing and that's all the reason you need to build a RAID 0 array and start benefitting from the 'real world' performance gains.

 

[headbox]

RAID 0 is a 100% necessity for playing back uncompressed video without dropping frames. I am an Editor at Disney TV Animation and can speak from years of experience. Non-RAID systems are just below the max sustained data rate needed for smooth playback.

 

[ribbon13]

So a striped set of 5400rpm IDEs will play video where a 15krpm SCSI will not???

Come on now...