Three 500GB 72000RPM in raid 0 Vs 10,000RPM rapter for gaming

adamknox

adamknox

adamknox

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Which would be better? (i dont care about saftey due to one of the hard drives braking i back up every week so what ever i lose wont hurt too much)

Which ones would increase load times more?
I was thinking about gettingan ssd but for the price and size of them i wouldnt get one! lol

P.s
Three of these http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-081-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=940 in raid

vs

Okay lets just say i had £100 (MAX!!!!) budget on a SSD... Which would be the best?
id want at least winodws 7, lord of the rings online, WoW, fallout 3 with mods on it... any ideas? :( I just need to get rid of the stutters lol!

Ive seen a lot of good things said about the Kingston 64GB SSDNow V SSD 2.5" SATA-II - Read = 200MB/sec, Write = 110MB/sec and thats around £70 in some places
 
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SSD.

160Gb Intel is £250, or wait until the G3 SSDs come out later this year.

Buying a HD now is a waste [as a boot drive] IMO.
 
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Concorde Rules said:
SSD.

160Gb Intel is £250, or wait until the G3 SSDs come out later this year.

Buying a HD now is a waste IMO.
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Im not really intrested in a SSD. for £250 id rather save up an extra £50 and get a 2nd gpu lol :( Im planning on running all my games (which come to WAY over 160GB and the windows O/S from the raid 0
 
I run 2 VR in raid 0 cause ssd isn't good enough, they aren't anywhere near near twice as fast at writes in real world, bout 40% but boot and read times are near 100% glad I used raid? Just.
Ps got them for 200 the pair

Doing a lot of writing I decided mechanical was a lot better than ssd.. but the write speeds aren't amazing
 
agree re SSD being better option, I got the 160gig Intel and its not full, windows and popular games on it, then a second normal drive for storage and occasional games, works well for me and the decreased load times is brilliant
 
95thrifles said:
agree re SSD being better option, I got the 160gig Intel and its not full, windows and popular games on it, then a second normal drive for storage and occasional games, works well for me and the decreased load times is brilliant
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Its not really an option tho :( lol! There is NOWAY i would pay £250 for a SSD lol Not when for an extra £50 i could get a 2nd sapphire and run it in crossfire ><
 
3 Drives in raid will be faster than a VelociRaptor at reading and writing files but the VelociRaptor will have quicker access time,

I would go with the raid setup, when i did it everything just felt sharper and i wouldn't go back to a single drive now, even my back up drive is in raid
 
adamknox said:
Its not really an option tho :( lol! There is NOWAY i would pay £250 for a SSD lol Not when for an extra £50 i could get a 2nd sapphire and run it in crossfire ><
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I thought it was a waste until I got one.

SSD is the single BIGGEST upgrade I have EVER done.

And i've gone from a 2.4Ghz 8600GTM MacBook Pro to a 2.8Ghz HD4870 Mac Pro.

If your spending that amount of money on an storage device and you don't buy an SSD for a boot/apps/game drive then you have something wrong with you.

To the person talking about writes / sequential speeds, who cares?

It's a boot drive, it does random READ transfers ALL THE TIME, rarely writes, never maxes the sequential speeds.

Sequential means jack all on a boot drive :rolleyes:
 
ssd enthusiam :) its still not practical £££ vs space, I could fill a ssd with program files alone lol. they so need to come down in price. If I had £250 to burn that would be a lot of raid drives i would order; space and speed. I have 4TB atm imagine ordering that on a ssd doesnt even bare thinking about lol.
 
I went from 4x Velociraptors in RAID0 to an SSD and I have yet to be impressed.
Yes it's a little faster, but not the mind blowing increase people get going from a single drive.
 
would have thought the raid would be quicker. How about 500gb blacks and short stroke them to the size you need..
 
I went from 4x Velociraptors in RAID0 to an SSD and I have yet to be impressed.
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Actually I think that says it all! The SSD is faster than 4(!) HDDs and you're not impressed?

To the OP, 3 drives in RAID0 for games is a complete waste IMHO. Gaming is not going to see a significant boost with that setup, nor boot times for that matter. There are so many other factors involved. You will always wait for the BIOS, controllers, RAID itself will add to your boot time, your RAM, etc, etc. What the SSD does is get over the rotational latency hurdle of mechanical drives and super fast access times means your apps will feel snappier. I went from RAID0 Raptors to a VR then SSD, and the latter was the best performer by miles plus it freed up SATA channels that would otherwise be hogged by multiple drives in an array. Bear in mind also that with RAID0, in spite of the term, there is no redundancy. You lose one drive, you've lost everything. A better solution if you insit on an array would be RAID5 which would use one of the drives for parity.
 
95thrifles said:
youve clearly never used a SSD, I had RAID before, it doesnt even compare with SSD
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if your talking to me, yes i have. Ive worked with my friends computer who has an ssd 60GB ssd which cost her around £150? (not sure what make) while it did increase performance and bootup speeds.. once again "I CANT JUSTIFY SPENDING £250 ON 160GB!!!!!!" The ssd's are far better than a raid0 set up, ive never said they wernt. I just dont want one at the price-space ratio.
 
Ziggy4 said:
Gaming is not going to see a significant boost with that setup, nor boot times for that matter.
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While i agree with this for most games, there are some games that seem to show a decrease in skips/stutters. for E.g LOTRO has shown that using raid0 set up do near enough stops stutters when the background loads as your running (an amazing game). Also fallout 3, AOC and apprently (not sure if this is true) sims 3.
 
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Doesn't raid0 actually slow down the seek time?

Best thing with SSD is their seek time. Everything feels faster

I went from 2x74gb raptor to m225 ssd. Best upgrade ever I had!

I even tried the ssd on old computer, p4 1.6ghz, 256mb ram with ide 40gb hard drive. Ssd made this machine 10x faster like totally new machine.

I will only use SSD for boot drive in the future.
 
I'm pretty sure that for the specific case of RAID0 your seek times will be the same as for a single drive?

adam, you are correct in that a very small number of games will benefit more than others when running from a fast drive, whether that be RAID, Raptor, SSD, or whatever but think you'll find the differences are only noticible in benchmarks. Fallout is one such game that streams the environment and does indeed suffer from micro-stutters. I used to run it from a pair of Raptors in RAID0 and the stutters were frequent and annoying, although that was more likely to be due to using SLI at the time. Since then I've run it on SSD / single GPU and it's been a smooth experience.

Not trying to push an SSD here, but don't rule it out. You could pick up an relatively inexpensive but decent SSD and something like an F3 for close to the cost of the array or a VelociRaptor. Still think you'd be better off with games installed on either your fast single HDD option or a boot SSD / cheap HDD alternative. Striping three drives just for games is a bit of a pointless exercise for little or no noticible gains IMHO.
 
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