Are 2 seperate drives faster than Raid 0

YoungBlood

YoungBlood

YoungBlood

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So I need to reinstall windows xp sometime soon. I currently have a Raid 0 setup but it still seems mega slow when running a game.
I was thinking that if instead I had them as 2 seperate drives and installed XP on 1 and games on another, that this might actualy give me better performance over a raid 0 setup.
Does anyone have a setup like this and do they find it faster over raid 0?
 
What I was planning on doing though, was to not use any raid setup at all, just have drive C: as windows xp and drive D: as where I would install games too.

Basicly I want stuff to load up as fast as possible, im not bothered about space or redundencys. I expected a raid 0 to be faster as it pulls the data from 2 drives at the same time.
Raid 1 as I understand it, just mirror's the drive for data protection, which I imagine would offer no increase in performance over a single drive :confused:

If however Raid 1 offers the fastest loading times, then I shall do that. I would just never of thought it did.

So my choices for fast loading times are
Raid 0
Raid 1
or 2 seperate drives, no raid setup at all, one with windows and one with games.
 
Trox said:
Raid 0 is faster than Raid 1...
Raid 1 is just mirroring/duplexing, for having a backup.
Click to expand...

Raid 1 writes are the same as a normal drive, but reading back is quicker as you can read from both drives just like in RAID0 iirc.

As for the OP:

RAID0 should give better performance than 2 seperate drives.
 
Raid - 0 = fastest but there is a catch...if one drive fails then you will lose ALL data on both drives. This hasn't happened to me yet - been running raid 0 for years :)
 
Actually Minsta, RAID1 writes are usually half the normal writes as the heads have to write in sync ;). If you have hardware RAID, this is often slightly faster due to the massive cache you can have. Reads are improved as you say, but this increase is pretty nominal - something of the order of 5MB/s sustained.
 
Minstadave said:
Looks like RAID 1 doesn't give that much of a performance hit on most chipsets:

http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q2/chipset-raid/index.x?pg=4

Looks pretty much to be the same as single drive performance, the minimum write speed does take a hit though.
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..but Dave, look at the reads! Hard drives have come on a long way since then. The best thing to look at is some ATTO benches of RAID1 on modern controllers using modern drives :p.

Usually, you see about 30-35MB/s writes and 60MB/s reads. I certainly did on my nF4 RAID1 and SiL3132 RAID1. Both are software RAID as I'm sure you are aware though - I'll have to run a test on a proper RAID card when I get one.
 
Last edited:
RAID 0 WILL be faster than RAID 1

RAID 0 implents a stripped disk array, data is broken down into blocks and each block is written to a sepeate disk drive, so therefore I/O performance is improved greatly by spreading the I/O load accross many channels and drives

RAID 1 is basically a MIRROR of the 1st drive.
 
YoungBlood said:
I'll stick with RAID0 then, I just expected it to be a bigger performance jump than it actualy was. Some people are hard to please.
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For day to day use RAID0 brings little benefit to desktop users, I don't even know why I bothered with RAID0 setups, I haven't noticed much difference.
 
YoungBlood said:
I'll stick with RAID0 then, I just expected it to be a bigger performance jump than it actualy was. Some people are hard to please.
Click to expand...


If you want more speed, just add more hdd's to the array, 4 hdd's in raid 0 always beat 2.
 
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