RAID 0 - How much increase in speed

blue4ice

blue4ice

blue4ice

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I have a 500gb SATA drive on a gigabyte DS3 board and was considering maybe buying a second 500gb drive to setup in a RAID 0 configuration using the onboard RAID controller.

Roughly how much speed do you gain from using RAID0 as opposed to a single drive? Is this noticeable when loading windows/other apps or just when playing games?
 
tbh I've never noticed any difference is setting up a RAID0 configuration over a single array and I've not read any articles that suggest it's a real performance boost.
 
Admiral Huddy said:
tbh I've never noticed any difference is setting up a RAID0 configuration over a single array and I've not read any articles that suggest it's a real performance boost.
Click to expand...

huh? Raid0 is stripe. It was built for performance.

Raid 0 helps when loading applications or saving, gaming and load times e.t.c
 
Thanks for the replies. I appreciate the actual performance gains (to the user) are somewhat subjective but, for example, say windows took 30 seconds to load on a single array would you see maybe a performance increase to say 20 or 25 seconds when in RAID 0 with two drives?
 
Well, it had been a while since I had used Raid, and few years back I could not notice much, if any, difference.

Over the weekend decided to try it out again. Got 2 SATA2 drives in Raid 0, and man Vista is a lot snappier.

My main reason for going Raid was cause of editing/encoding, and though have not actually tested this yet, I was surprised Vista was performing a little better for me.

Edit: whoops that should be 3 disks in RAID0, not 2
 
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i have 2 raptors in RAID and the performance is a lot more than a single drive, loading times on any game is less than 5 seconds, compared to15-20 when i had a single drive
 
mmm sounds like a mixed bag of results. RaiderX were you using the onboard RAID controller or a card?

Does anyone have more experience using SATAII drives?
 
I have tried Raid0 on every pair of hard drives I've had and on every motherboard just so I can see what each tests out like, I run several benchmarks and I have never had any that gave more than 12% increase, remember that's the best, the worst was like 2% in my opinion I don't think Raid 0 is worth the doubling data loss risk for such a small performance gain.

PS
I've done the hard drive tests which show massive increases it just doesn't work out for real as far as I have seen.

I will still continue to test when I buy new drives & mobo's though one day I might find something spooktakular.
 
Ofcoarse its faster, no review or anyone can really tell you, you MUST try it yourself and feel the speed booting up and doing every day chores like unraring files etc.

There are plenty reviews show it works and its back in fashion again and even OEM PC come with Raid0 (Dell etc), it can help game load times but as reviews claim, games are better coded now so it benefits them less than it did years ago.

I ran 2x Raptor X's in Raid0, since they seek far faster than any 7200rpm HDD the slower seek in Raid will still be about the same as a single 7200rpm HDD's seek.
 
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Using RAID0 over a single HDD, the only performance increase that is really noticeable I have found is:

1) Working with large (eg video) files, moving/copying etc.

2) Unzipping large files...

3) There would be also a slight decrease in time, in games loading...

Apart from the above I have not noticed any other performance increases. :)
 
Thanks guys. I think it is something I may give a go at when I have a spare few £££ to buy another drive. Worse case is that I dont find any performance increase and just use the two drives in a standard single array
 
Using RAID0 with 4 fast Gen2 discs on a 680i board I found the biggest difference was windows boot up times... 2 discs I didn't notice much difference, maybe 2-3 seconds less, but with 4 discs my boot times were around 10x faster... loading games was faster but not hugely so, the biggest difference was unzipping and copying files... everything else there wasn't a huge if even noticeable performance difference.
 
As you can see raid 0 doesn't improve boot/load times.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/9124/6

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=10

http://www.overclockers.com/articles1063/index02.asp

Throughput is not the bottleneck of loading times, it's latency. Not much use for games being able to read linear data at 100MB/s+ from the hdd when data is spread over the disk and has to be located. If you look at windows boot time benchmarks, you'll see data is only being read at 25MB/s because it's not linear.
 
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Use it and time it yourself, and Anandtechs review was later shown to be crap same as their whole site basically IMO. (Gave up on them after their 6800Ultra+PureVideo lies).
 
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