RAID 0 is it worth doing?

Bobmunkhouse

Bobmunkhouse

Bobmunkhouse

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5 Nov 2005
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Hi

At the moment I have one 120GB SATA drive and I am think of getting more storage. I was thinking of getting 2 more drives and setting a RAID 0 setup and using the old 120GB just a storage. But I just want to know it if i will really notice a lot of difference form a single SATA drive I play games and that kind of thing not really bothered about backing up date its just a speed thing.

Thanks for any info
 
Raid0 systems only really excel when reading/writing large files(preferably in contiguous blocks) so are excellent when you are video editing or working with large graphics files. It will probably improve your load times and maybe even help a little in games but whether you will really notice anything other than in benchmarks is a little more dubious.

Have you considered either a Raptor(probably the 74gb) or even a low end SCSI, although I don't know too much about the ins and outs of SCSI it is about as fast as you will be able to get with some drives 15k rpm.
 
I have looked at the Raptor's but for the same price as the 1 Raptor 74GB I can get 2 160GB SATA drives in RAID 0 would the Raptor still be faster then the 2 drives in RAID 0?
 
2x 7200 sata drives would probably be faster for most usages than a raptor on it's own.
2 disks with 2 caches will be much faster for burst writing than the raptor, which will be good for gaming/ opening programs like office apps. For sustained writing the raptor is about level pegging speed wise. Can't remember how fast but probably around 75MB/s.
The big advantage the raptor has is seek time, thanks to spindle speed. However if your a speed freak, for about £30 more than a 74gig raptor, you can get a few 36gig raptors. They're nearly as fast and in raid will push data at high rates, the seek times are slightly off those of the 74gig but not much, but with several 10k disks your looking at closer to 90-100MB/s sustainable transfer.
 
Sorry to hijack, but a similar question: I have a single 250 Western Digital (2500KS, 16meg cache) and I'm about to get another. Is it worth putting these in RAID0? I generally have a constant low level of HDD activity (1-5MiB/sec), for file seeding and web hosting and this impacts my overall performance during heavy disk access as the WD doesn't do CQ. Will RAID0 help this?
 
mosfet said:
Sorry to hijack, but a similar question: I have a single 250 Western Digital (2500KS, 16meg cache) and I'm about to get another. Is it worth putting these in RAID0? I generally have a constant low level of HDD activity (1-5MiB/sec), for file seeding and web hosting and this impacts my overall performance during heavy disk access as the WD doesn't do CQ. Will RAID0 help this?
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I dont think it will help that much you will still have more bandwidth but both the drives will be doing that background stuff proberly better just adding the other drive and using one for OS and games and stuff and one for file seeding and web hosting stuff.

Im no expert but thats what i think can anyone else confirm this?
 
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on IDE you have just enough bandwidth to run 2 disks at full whack. Your probably on SATA anyway so it should be fine to have one disk for use one for seeding. Raid would make the whole thing faster and there's no real downside to it, but it won't do a lot to boost your performance unless you use the disk heavily.
 
It's often said that raid is better for video editing encoding etc but surely having the source and destination files on independent drives would be faster otherwise the array reads a little, moves, writes a little, moves back etc. With two individual drives you have two seperate streaming operations, one read, one write.

Obviously 2 independant raid0 arrays would be better.

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