2 disk RAID0 to 4 disk - worth it?

somewhatdamaged · 10 Nov 2009 at 11:32

Hi,

I have two Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB disks in RAID0 for games and music etc

Would i get much of a speed increase on game loading times if i recreated the array on 4 of the above disks instead?

Redundancy isn't an issue, my documents are on a separate drive and music is backed up etc

DIABLO · 10 Nov 2009 at 12:42

Any increase you will actually feel when loading things will be small unless you do things with very large files.

Toastor · 10 Nov 2009 at 13:30

DIABLO said:
Any increase you will actually feel when loading things will be small unless you do things with very large files.

Agreed.

Although your transfer speed will be a bit faster, random access times will be a fraction slower, so any benefit in game loading times probably won't be that great.

Instead of buying two more F3's, have you thought about using an SSD for your games and using your existing F3's just for media etc?

glenimp617 · 10 Nov 2009 at 14:23

Don't do it

Last year I was running 2 x WD RE3s in Raid-0. Decided to add another two into the array but noticed it wasn't quite as fast. Sold them in the end and just stuck with 2

somewhatdamaged · 10 Nov 2009 at 14:42

I considered an SSD, but with the steam folder approaching 150GB, i just don't know if it's cost effective compared to standard mechanical drives

glenimp617 · 10 Nov 2009 at 15:36

somewhatdamaged said:
I considered an SSD, but with the steam folder approaching 150GB, i just don't know if it's cost effective compared to standard mechanical drives

surely you can move that to one of the samsungs? Just use the SSD for windows, office etc etc

somewhatdamaged · 10 Nov 2009 at 15:49

It's not the speed of Windows i was concerned about, it was pretty much just game load times. If the 4 disk Samsung RAID0 isn't noticeably quicker than the 2 disk, it's probably not worth it

BeeP · 10 Nov 2009 at 16:13

There is a hard drive benchmark thread on here somewhere, worth a look.

Zarf · 10 Nov 2009 at 17:29

go SSD, It's worth it. My game load times are roughly half what they were even with RAID0 raptors.

Why not think about RAIDing 4 Kingston 40GB SSD's? thats 160GB for £260 and the sequential read (for game loads) would be phenominal.

RavenLunatic · 10 Nov 2009 at 20:29

Using 4 Seagate 7200.12 500GB in RAID 0 via motherboard intel raid chip. I get 280-320MB/s read on and around 200 MB writes as per sandra benchmark last time I checked. Smaller files and random read/writes performance drops to about 90MB/S. So I got 2TB of fast RAID 0 for about £160 instead of 80GB of Intel SSD. Id say 4 Disk RAID is worth it if you want speed and capacity.

Toastor · 10 Nov 2009 at 21:52

somewhatdamaged said:
I considered an SSD, but with the steam folder approaching 150GB, i just don't know if it's cost effective compared to standard mechanical drives

Fair enough, you have considerably more games installed than I do!

Until SSD's get cheaper, 4 disk raid 0 is probably your best option. A couple of Velociraptors in raid 0 for your games would also be nice, but the price on those isn't cheap either!

Corasik · 10 Nov 2009 at 21:57

I never found raid0 helped games at all, IOPS is more important for most games than absolute transfer rates and raid0's generally have slightly worse iops than a single disk because of the overheads.

A single Velociraptor or SSD with all the games installed on it would be the best option.

somewhatdamaged · 11 Nov 2009 at 08:36

I also have a 300GB Velociraptor that i used to keep as a dedicated games drive, and i have to say that games seem to load quite a bit quicker on the RAID0 F3 disks. I've not ran any benchmarks, but it certainly seems quicker!

BeeP · 11 Nov 2009 at 09:05

I run 2x WD RE3 in RAID0 & my times are a bit better, I get about 215 max read with HD Tune. I've seen some on the benchmark thread get a fair bit more each time they add a drive.