To RAID or NOT to RAID?

[1ManArmY]

I was going to spend a gang of cash on a graphics card but I am still not certain that ATI 9700 PRO is the way to go with all the driver issues (CAT 3.1 vs 3.2) and patches needed to play a specific games. I was told that I could get a performance boost from a RAID card but I would risk losing data if one of the HD crashed. I thought maybe I would look into that and settle for a ASUS ti4200 AGP8X until the NV35 card comes out. Can I get some advice as whether or not to go with RAID or is it too risky.

 

[boyRacer]

You're better off running one of those HDs with 8mb... RAID doesn't offer noticeable performance for the casual user/gamer...

<--- runs a RAID 0 array

 

[1ManArmY]

I was looking at dual 80 GB Western Digital 7200 RPM Ultra with Promise FastTrak 133 Tx2000 RAID card with a P4 3.06 512 RAM

 

[dguy6789]

raid is supposed ot be twice as fast, but a 7200 rpm with 8meg buffer will be plenty fast.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: 1ManArmY
I was looking at dual 80 GB Western Digital 7200 RPM Ultra with Promise FastTrak 133 Tx2000 RAID card with a P4 3.06 512 RAM

I'm running something similar (see sig). It's pretty quick stuff. Normally it just leaves your computer with a little quicker "feeling" but on occasion it really shines. You should see peoples jaw drops when they see my load times on big items like Unreal 2 levels.

Definately have a backup in mind though even if it's burning dvd's or something.

I think your idea's about purchasing a video card are excellent. It is just NOT the time to buy the top of the line video card when the crown will probably switch heads a couple more times pretty soon. Let the dust settle and grab the fastest out there when you hear doom goes gold. If they have a non agp 8x card available for less you might look at that too.

 

[chsh1ca]

RAID's speed advantages only really become apparent if you run them on a fast bus. Let's face it, most IDE drives can't fill the ATA/133 pipe yet except in burst situations.

Alternately, you have SCSI-RAID solutions, and SCSI RAID is now available in SCSI Ultra320 (320MHz bus, as far as I know). This means that in a large RAID, it could be possible to max out a 320MHz bus.

Keep in mind that what's slowing you down in games, as I understand it, is both the latency to the drives and the amount of data the drives can pull off at any one point. In theory, a RAID0 with 4 drives could fill a pipe twice as fast as a RAID0 with two drives. The more spindles you have, the more data you can retrieve at any one point.

Now, with IDE RAID, there's some rather obvious limitations, making what I just said a rather moot point. I do remember seeing something with quite a few ATA RAID channels on it a while back, but I can't recall which card it was.

Effectively, the speed gains are really only there IME when you have a lot of drives on a fast bus. The other pro for IDE RAID0 is the ability to have larger single partitions. It's too bad not too many IDE RAID adaptors support RAID5.

 

[Budmantom]

Get the 9700pro or pre-order the 9800pro, if you actually spent the money on the 3.06 the 9700/9800 is a drop in the bucket. If you have problems then return it.

IMHO the wd 80gb hg 7200 rpm with 8mb buffer and a 9700pro is the best bet.

Tom