Soldato
I myself have opted for multiple HDs with No RAID, as I have found it to be slightly better for me.
I am constantly reading and writing to my HDs, I am burning DVDs every day to 3 or 4 Drives at a time, I am running utorrent & folding 24/7 and I am permanently defragging my drives.
With running seperate HDs doing their own tasks on their own line, I have found that I suffer from absolutely ZERO slowdowns in disk access.
I have found, that although when running RAID on a pair of HDs, the disk access is in itself quicker, however, there is only so much data that will travel over the lines, using a basic 2-drive array, you have one drive per line, which means 2 lines ( If you use one and have a Master+Slave Array, you will be completely defeating the object of RAID, but of course you all know that ), but if you have drives not only on seperatelines, but also seperate controlers, you might be only on one line, but you are on one line per device... The end result is that if you are reading and writing with several apps all at once, you wil gain a fairly substantial boost across the board.
Like I said, one or two R/W Ops and its not much, but doing a load of R/W ops and you will start to see the benefits.
Try it and see...
Try it with just a couple of things...
Burn a large file to DVD, defrag all your Drives, and copy another large file and time it... Now time it without burnign and defragging... On my system there is no difference at all... Maybe 1 second if its over a gig or so, but if I used 2 drives as a single RAID, then the copy operation will be significantly slower.
Only my 2p worth, which everyone seems to say is silly, wrong, and wont work... except those that actually do it.
Now, 4 drives in 2 arrays will be quicker of course, but I have gone for one partition per HD, usually going on 4 drives per PC, with my C: kept as a small 8GB with no junk in it, only Windows itself, and the rest of the drive as a TEMP partition that I use purely to store my Drivers, Utilities, and ISOs, D: is my Apps, E: my Media, and F: is for my torrents and junk.
I am constantly reading and writing to my HDs, I am burning DVDs every day to 3 or 4 Drives at a time, I am running utorrent & folding 24/7 and I am permanently defragging my drives.
With running seperate HDs doing their own tasks on their own line, I have found that I suffer from absolutely ZERO slowdowns in disk access.
I have found, that although when running RAID on a pair of HDs, the disk access is in itself quicker, however, there is only so much data that will travel over the lines, using a basic 2-drive array, you have one drive per line, which means 2 lines ( If you use one and have a Master+Slave Array, you will be completely defeating the object of RAID, but of course you all know that ), but if you have drives not only on seperatelines, but also seperate controlers, you might be only on one line, but you are on one line per device... The end result is that if you are reading and writing with several apps all at once, you wil gain a fairly substantial boost across the board.
Like I said, one or two R/W Ops and its not much, but doing a load of R/W ops and you will start to see the benefits.
Try it and see...
Try it with just a couple of things...
Burn a large file to DVD, defrag all your Drives, and copy another large file and time it... Now time it without burnign and defragging... On my system there is no difference at all... Maybe 1 second if its over a gig or so, but if I used 2 drives as a single RAID, then the copy operation will be significantly slower.
Only my 2p worth, which everyone seems to say is silly, wrong, and wont work... except those that actually do it.
Now, 4 drives in 2 arrays will be quicker of course, but I have gone for one partition per HD, usually going on 4 drives per PC, with my C: kept as a small 8GB with no junk in it, only Windows itself, and the rest of the drive as a TEMP partition that I use purely to store my Drivers, Utilities, and ISOs, D: is my Apps, E: my Media, and F: is for my torrents and junk.