HDD Performance

Nebzor · 5 May 2008 at 16:16

I'm looking to buy a new HDD(s), and was wondering about performance. I am correct in thinking a RAID 0 array increases performance, yes?

So which of the following would be faster, mainly for gaming etc.:

Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB
Western Digital Caviar 640GB (WD6400AAKS)
Or two lower-capacity drives in RAID 0?

Am looking hopefully to spend the £100 max, so if there are any better performance for money combinations or drives lower than this that'd be awesome.

Thanks in advance.

semi-pro waster · 5 May 2008 at 16:29

Raid0 can increase performance but it really only does so for large contiguous files e.g. those you'd find in video/audio/graphics editing.

How much space do you require? If you don't need huge amounts (and have a good backup strategy) then you might like something along the lines of the Seagate 250gb 7200.10 for Raid0 as it is a single platter drive and very quick. I don't know exactly how it stacks up to the above two but it should be quite favourably.

Nebzor · 5 May 2008 at 17:32

Space isn't really the issue, it's the speed I'm more interested in.

UTmaniac · 6 May 2008 at 09:40

Sorry about hijacking, but on a similar note...

Are we saying that RAID 0 would not have an appreciable difference in loading say 80MB maps from Unreal Tournament 3 (along with other files read inbetween changing maps, such as game code;music; models etc)?

semi-pro waster · 6 May 2008 at 10:21

If the maps are large and stored as a single block then Raid0 probably would be of benefit but you also have to balance that against the increased risk of data loss. If the files are spread across the disk then it will be a lot less noticeable.

Giving my own experience, I ran Raid0 arrays on two separate computers for about 2-3 years then went back to single hard drives and noticed almost no speed difference at all.