Is RAID 0 worth it?

[el Kuarlos]

Hi all, have recently changed the rig a fair bit and started having some driver issues, only just installed the os so I am going to knock it back down and rebuild the software again next few days.

I have two westerndigital 500gb drives, one OS, one programmes. I am thinking of changing it to a RAID setup (raid 0) the data risk doesnt really bother me too much, would backup to an external source.

I game a lot, surf the web, and dont do anything crazy like encoding or massive photoshop.

Rest of system is high end AMD (crosshair III mobo) and a 5850.

Is it worth the performance difference?

 

[rz30]

Google for some benchmarks. Most will tell you that raid 0 is mainly beneficial when reading/writing large files otherwise you will probably not notice much difference. No harm if you have onboard raid card though.

 

[d_brennen]

Yes. And no.

My system does feel better to use with RAID0 than with just my 3 7200.12 500GB drives seperatly. In the "real world" only probably saves a couple of seconds on loading times. When I have some spare cash I will be getting a 120 odd GB SSD and relagating them to media duties

If speed is your motive I would suggest you do the same. One of the things to consider is that in RAID0 all your disks are accessing/writing at the same time. My rig is about 2 1/2" from my ears and it sounds like a Geiger counter sometimes lol

 

[el Kuarlos]

Thanks for the input, D brennen my sentiments exactly, a SSD is my next upgrade but until they have stabilised in development and come down in price then I am going to wait.

Its frustrating, HD's are really bottlenecking my rig at times.

 

[Corasik]

Random access time has such an impact on traditional hard disks, that 4k random read, and writes are always going to be bad, and raid0 just adds a small amount of software latency in addition to the phyiscal latency.

I noticed virtually no difference in general "feel" of my system when I raided up my drives, no difference in gameing, infact the only place where there was any difference at all was copying big files. As soon as the CPU becomes bottleneck (such as media encoding) the advantage of the raid is pretty much gone anyway.

SSD on the other hand, ultra fast, and right when you need it Just shame about the capacity and price.

 

[davem1979]

A RAID 0 pair of fast hard drives, like Caviar Black, Samsung F3 etc. go well with an SSD in that most SSD's can read over 200Mb/s and by raiding a pair of 7200rpm hard drives you'll get close to or more than 200Mb/s write, therefore, there shouldn't be any hard drive bottleneck in transferring files from the SSD to the RAID 0 set. Mainly, you will only notice this though in doing large file transfers.

Best,
David

 

[el Kuarlos]

Yea i am pretty much resigned to the fact I will be waiting for SSD tech to mature to a point where the cost-benefit is right for me.

Now aint the time to go buying super expensive platter HD's either.

Kinda in limbo right now, chop chop SS developers!