HDDs in Raid0 even worth it?

[Andrew Britain]

I have a 256gb SSD in my main system, coupled with 2 2TB WD Blacks for games storage in Raid0. I put two partitions on there - I short stroked the first partition and created another one to fill up the rest of the drive. Well, 5 years later, that isn't working so well, as the short stroked section is showing slower 4k random read and write times than the other part.

I need the whole 2TB so I'm wondering now if I would be better off just having one partition covering the entire Raid array.

So clearly my drive configuration isn't working, and it's got me wondering is there any actual point to Raid0 these days? It's a bit old school, but still seems like a valid way to get better than a single HDD performance without going the whole hog to an SSD. Since I can't afford an SSD big enough, what are the benefits over single drives for gaming? Noticed in a few games I've been getting stutter due to texture pop-in lately and looking at the bechmark results I'm starting to realise why!

 

[skyripper]

You'd probably be better off shrinking the partition on your SSD down by 32GB and using that spare capacity as a cache for a HD.
Intels onboard RAID controller can do that for you (Think its called acceleration or something).

Its not something I've touched for a few years, since SSDs became big enough to hold the OS and a couple of games, and things like SteamMover (and the newer Steam Library functionality) let me shift older games off to the HD without reinstalling.

 

[BongoHunter]

Ive have 2 striped arrays in my workstation, one with 2 Samsung 850 Evos (SATA) and another with a pair 960 Evo (NVME)

The performance boost for me is huge with disk intensive tasks, and was cheaper that getting a really high performance single drive like the Intel 900p

 

[britain4]

Using part of the SSD as a cache seems an excellent idea, would free up an extra 2TB of storage and minimise worries about one of the two 5+ year old drives failing.. I might just do that, thanks for the tip.

Only problem is I don’t think here’s any way of converting it to non-striped without losing any data so I’ll probably have to get an external HDD - which would be a good idea anyway (although all important stuff is on OneDrive)

Yeah I’ve heard it works well with SSDs but with HDDs I’d wondered if it was just making poor read/write times slightly less poor rather than actually giving good performance. I know it’s not supposed to be great for gaming but that’s what the short stroking was for, but now that’s gone south for whatever reason I might as well just get rid of the whole setup and try the cache thing