2 New Raptors + Raid Array Questions

[AndySooooN]

I want to setup a Raid 0 array made up of 2:

Western Digital Raptor 36GB WD360ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM's

That will give me 72GB right? I Only want to run Vista and games on it. I Mostly only ever have around 4 games installed at a time so this should be enough space.

Is this worth it, or does any1 have any better ideas?

Also, what should i use and how do i set up a raid 0 Array?

 

[Darkwave]

Yup, that would give you one 72GB disk drive.

I just set up my first RAID-0 array this afternoon, in fact these are the first time I have even touched SATA disks, and I found setting up the array very simple. It practically guides you through it the first time you try booting/installing to them.

Just make sure you have the SATA/RAID drivers on floppies.

 

[xiphrex]

I would advise against having raid 0.

I have had raid 0 with 2 raptors in the past and the only benefits that I could see was that I could boast about the HD tach test speed and also video encoding was a little faster, but normal windows, programs and games ran and loaded pretty much the same, maybe 1 second max faster, but that was all. This is all not worth it for the risk your taking. With raid 0, if one hard drive fails, you lose all the data on both hard drives. You are in a way doubling the risk that you would lose your data in a hard drive failure.

Personally I would put windows on one of the hard drives and leave the other for programs and games. Or just buy one of the bigger raptors and put everything on that. You wont notice a real improvement if you go with raid 0 (there is a major placebo effect that makes it feel like it is faster, but it isnt).

The above though is assuming you just play games and do the odd work on the computer, and arent into video/sound encoding, otherwise I think its entirely different and raid 0 would be faster. But imo, the risk is not worth it!

 

[Darkwave]

These disks definitely respond faster than my old hard disk, that may or may not be because of the RAID-0 configuration though. I was previously using a single IDE Seagate Barracuda 40GB with 8MB cache.

With that disk I got noticable pauses when opening the start menu and any applications. With my new 2x SATA-II Barracuda 320GB 16MB cache RAID-0 configuration those pauses have completely disappeared.

Audio/video encoding is definitely faster with RAID-0, but then again I'd be worried if it wasn't.

Yet to try anything like Battlefield 2 map loading to see if there's any improvement there.