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What has RAID 0,1 done for you?

T

travler

Senior member
Im planning on puttng together a new system. It will mostly be used for games, programming, internet, and some graphics work.

Will getting a raid system with a couple matched 40 or 60GB drives give me any kind of noticiable performance boost, or should
I just stick with 1 drive?

I've read a few articles and some posts on the subject but am still not sure.

thanks

Travler
 
I have a system based on an Abit KR7A-RAID that uses a pair of IBM 45-gig drives. Two of my biggest applications are editing sizeable audio files (typical size is close to a gig). That's where the RAID really shines. The other is technical stock analysis - accessing thousands of little bitty files.

I recently had the opportunity to see my the software I run on another machine, roughly the same speed and specs, but no RAID. For that application - the speed of disk access was roughly the same as mine.

While I sing the praises of RAID-0 daily and have no intentions of ever NOT having one, it's benefits are NOT across the board, and that type of system is NOT for everyone.

I noticed that one of your intended applications is programming. Lest you think that redundant file copies (RAID-1) is the way to go, keep in mind that a file that gets over-written, deleted, corrupted (software) on one drive gets equally trashed on the other. RAID does NOT replace a good revision control system or backup strategy. It simply allows you to keep going (immediately) should one of your drives suffer catastrophic failure.

Best of luck.
 
My OS resides on a single drive, my RAID 0 array is strickly for Video capture/edting which makes a difference, especially with large captures. No more dropped frames on the inside tracks.
 
Raid sounds cool, but unless you have a need for it, don't use it. I was contemplating Raid 0 cause of its speed, but I didn't go that route cause it wouldn't be that much of a benefit for what I do. Raid 1 wouldn't do much for me except make a duplicate copy, which I can do by a backup if I want and not waste another drive, and Raid 5 is too expensive for me. If I did go raid, I think I would go scsi raid but even then there's consequences just like ide, and even more expensive that scsi can be.

For games, internet, and general programming you won't notice any benefit. Graphic work might if the files are large and you are copying from digital video or something but other than that unless you are running a 24/7 server, you probably won't find much use for Raid. If you have a raid controller on your mobo, you can still use the controller as extra ide channels, which is nice, but I wouldn't go raid with it.
 
OK HERES THE SCOOP!

raid will give u a SLIGHT performance GAIN in READ mode. however u take a SLIGHT performance HIT in WRITE mode.
 

Instead of a RAID, why not just get one of those Western Digital drives with the 8 mb cache? ~$220 for a 120 mb drive. That price is comparable to what you would spend on a RAID and you would get alot more space (as if you needed it)
 
If you have a seperate controller for RAIDing, just throw in a couple old striped (RAID 0) 10GB drives for CD-Image creation (Tell WinXP to create temp image files there) and set the Virtual Memory cache to it. It will be VERY worth it, and it won't be holding anything critical. You might want to give Virtual Memory its own partition, so it can stay contiguous (It doesn't like to defrag later). Also, when you need to dump large files around and such (Like a 600MB movie from a CD just so you don't have to put up with the CD stuttering through the movie) it will come in handy. Just make sure you get Western Digital or IBM, as their diagnostic tools will probably come in VERY handy (They're the only ones that will remap bad sectors, which cause compounded problems on RAID 0 setups).
 
thanks for the advice. Im prety sure i have no use for RAID now. so i will just stick with my 40gig and if the WD 120Gig ever comes down ill go with that.

 
The ONLY difference I saw going RAID was a significant increase in my HD benchmark scores...THAT'S IT. I didn't see any REAL positive or negative effects going to RAID 0.
 
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