RAID 0 - How much increase in speed

lol, i used to be like helmutcheese when i was 14.
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I hate it when people refer to age being the same as maturity..

On a more on-topic statement.
For things like gaming with RAID 0, if you copy the entire game to your harddrive, and played it without a DVD, would there be much performance increase compared to doing the same thing on a single disk ?
 
DavidB said:
I hate it when people refer to age being the same as maturity..

On a more on-topic statement.
For things like gaming with RAID 0, if you copy the entire game to your harddrive, and played it without a DVD, would there be much performance increase compared to doing the same thing on a single disk ?
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When you install a game all the data from the dvd is copied to the hdd. The dvd is only used to verify you have an original copy of the game. So it would be as my earlier links demonstrated, no improvement. Raid 1 using split seeks would be able to improve gaming because it roughly halves the access times by independantly accessing both hdds at once and seeking for files.
 
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with all these RAID0 tests are any of you actually using a decent RAID card or just the onboard RAID?
 
mrbios said:
with all these RAID0 tests are any of you actually using a decent RAID card or just the onboard RAID?
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Onboard on my P35.

Running nicely. Sure, there might not be very noticeable gains, which I was expecting, but Vista certainly snappier. But anything that helps Vista with disk access is a good thing.

Oh, Helmut, I had contributed, if you looked further up. And was merely suggesting you try a calmer approach to conversing with people. Makes the world a better place for all.

But what do I know with my lowly post count? :)
 
on topic, im gonna setup a raid0 on my amcc 3ware 9650-se controller and check this out myself.

DavidB said:
I hate it when people refer to age being the same as maturity..
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off topic... i think you will find i made a statement that i was immature at 14. Furthermore, the correlation between age and maturity would be a stataticians wet dream. Maturity by definition is the ability to respond to certain situations in an appropriate manner, which tends to be learned behavious (praise the lord for wiki). Hence age and maturity correlate perfectly.

*waves at helmutcheese*. :p
 
Seeing as we are sort of on the topic of raptors what do you guys think of this.
I have the chance to get two 74gig Raptors (8mb cache) for around £80 used from a friend, do you think it would be worth getting them and using them for OS, apps and games and use my 500gig purely as storage?
Would i see any speed increase in game load times and windows boot times or not?
Getting a lot of mixed messages from this thread but have learnt a lot.
 
analog said:
Seeing as we are sort of on the topic of raptors what do you guys think of this.
I have the chance to get two 74gig Raptors (8mb cache) for around £80 used from a friend, do you think it would be worth getting them and using them for OS, apps and games and use my 500gig purely as storage?
Would i see any speed increase in game load times and windows boot times or not?
Getting a lot of mixed messages from this thread but have learnt a lot.
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May sound strange but I would actually get a single 74GB (16MB cache) instead. It would be more fit-for-purpose I think with regards to how you want to use it, unless of course you need the 2nd drive for greater storage capacity.
 
Energize said:
Raid 1 using split seeks would be able to improve gaming because it roughly halves the access times by independantly accessing both hdds at once and seeking for files.
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Oooooo - never thought of that - sounds like just what I might need. Is this something that has to have controller support, or does it get set up in windows? Not that I'm complaining about my 3.5ms seek times, but as they say ' every little helps' ;)

At the OP - as a man who loves his raid setup in spite of the blood, sweat and tears that went into its installation - I would have to go with the wise words espoused earlier. If you have 2 identical drives and a decent onboard controller, then you might as well go for Raid 0. If not - I wouldn't bother spending the time and effort required - simply not worth it - there are other areas of your system that would benefit more from the attention and cash! I wouldn't even match an old drive anymore as the cost of the second drive would be better spent buying a brand new, faster singleton.

If you must have the fastest available then drop me a line and I'll let you know how it's really done *cough* scsi *cough* ahem - who said that? ;)
 
Imy said:
May sound strange but I would actually get a single 74GB (16MB cache) instead. It would be more fit-for-purpose I think with regards to how you want to use it, unless of course you need the 2nd drive for greater storage capacity.
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Would the extra cache make that much of a difference?
I thought (probably wrong) it stores recently read and written data so that it can be re-accessed without reading it from the platters again and generally, it also will cache data in sectors near the one you read from because you're likely to read data near what you last read/wrote.

Would that really help performance significantly?
 
analog said:
Would the extra cache make that much of a difference?
I thought (probably wrong) it stores recently read and written data so that it can be re-accessed without reading it from the platters again and generally, it also will cache data in sectors near the one you read from because you're likely to read data near what you last read/wrote.

Would that really help performance significantly?
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There is a law of diminishing returns when it comes to increasing cache sizes. Because of the increased time it takes to refill the cache after a cache miss a larger cache will contain a larger number of possible hits rather than more data for a small number of hits. The upshot of this is that the when a cache hit occurs there isn't any real performance improvement over a drive with a smaller cache but rather there are fewer cache misses.

The problem is caching algorithms are pretty good so while (and these are numbers out of the air) the hit ratio of an 8Mb drive might be 70%, that of a 16Mb drive might only be 80% and a 32Mb drive 85% etc.
 
analog said:
Would the extra cache make that much of a difference?
I thought (probably wrong) it stores recently read and written data so that it can be re-accessed without reading it from the platters again and generally, it also will cache data in sectors near the one you read from because you're likely to read data near what you last read/wrote.

Would that really help performance significantly?
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Hi,

It will make some difference but what I lazily neglected to mention was the drive itself has other improvements aside from the increased cache size.

Here's a side-by-side comparison with the older 8MB cache model along with benchmark comparisons:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2690&p=2
 
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