Raid 0 - Treating myself

[Morthoseth]

Treating myself to a couple of 150gb Raptors, and i'm wondering whether it is worth Raid 0'ing them.

Main reason for purchase is to run fraps with as little slowdown as possible, unaware of how fraps works exactly im not sure if the Striping will make recording more fluent or whether it will be worse than using two seperate HDD's

Rest of my system is the following

E6600 Conroe
GeiL PC6400 DDR2 2gb
BFG 8800GTS OC 640MB
Gigabyte DS3 Mobo

What would you do with this hardware? Currently i have an old-ish cheap hard drive from seagate which beeps, makes a lot of loud noises and so on at random times, which i imagine is the reason recording with fraps causes things to judder so much.

Please advise :>

 

[Lonz]

I'm under the illusion that a RAID-O setup would only benefit your game play when loading new maps etc.

 

[Dist]

RAID 0 helps with writing data, not just reading it like when loading maps. because there are more then 1 HDDs, more data can be writen at the same time, so if the problem with fraps is that it is having trouble writing the data fast enough, then RAID 0 should help, if 1 drive on its own doesnt max out its write speed with fraps running, then 2 drives in RAID 0 wont help because write speed wouldnt be the problem in that case.

 

[jbloggs]

Generally RAID0 is only beneficial (over a single HDD) if you are working with and unzipping large (ie video) files.

The Access time remains the same for both, ie a single Raptor and 2 x Raptors in RAID0 will have an Access time (in HDTach) of about 7.6-7.8ms.

There is no "real" performance increase in gaming when using RAID0 as opposed to a single (like) HDD.

There is also a number of articles about that bear this out.

 

[Energize]

Won't help with fraps, the cpu is the bottleneck, unless it records it uncompressed or something retarded like that.

The max res fraps records at is 800x600, which at 30fps uncompressed is only 43.2MB/s which your hdd should easily handle.

 

[BruceLee]

Won't help with fraps, the cpu is the bottleneck, unless it records it uncompressed or something retarded like that.

The max res fraps records at is 800x600, which at 30fps uncompressed is only 43.2MB/s which your hdd should easily handle.

it does record it uncompressed, 30 secs is around 300mb or more.

I would suggest saving fraps data to a separate drive and using dual core to minimise the cpu hit.

Perfectly fine on my system, I have fraps on one drive and the game on the other.

EDIT

Also I think the new version of fraps can record at whatever res you like if you have a dual core chip.

 

[Energize]

Seems strange they only allow uncompressed, it actually takes more cpu time processing uncompressed video than compressing with xvid.

I suppose if your having problems you can always reduce the framerate, and then increase it later using motion estimation.