Raid 0 - Western Digital Caviar Blue 640Gb

[JayEnnBee]

Hey all.
I'm Building a new PC, with and Asus Board (P5Q Pro) probably and a Q6600.

The purpose of this PC is general use and Gaming.

I've noticed in my current PC (Non Raid) that patching games takes ages.
(100's Mb Patches).

I'm considering building the new system with Raid 0, using WD Caviar Blue drives.

my questions are as follows:

1) I'm aware that Raid 0 is for performance, but is it worth it? How much performance? over say a 1Gb file copy, what benefit would be gained?

2) I've Built a number of PC's, but never toyed much with BIOS settings. Is setting up a raid array likely to make me swear and wish I'd just bought a PC off the shelf, or is it pretty simple?

Just looking for a gauge really, as I only recently considered going for a Raid Array.

Thanks for your ideas!

 

[Grimley]

Dont do it if you value your data, unless you backup regularly. Happened to me 2 years ago, cost me a lot of time & money before I gave up.

 

[DavidS14]

I've just put a new rig together and it's my first raid setup.

Asus P5Q-E
2x WD 320GB RE3's in Raid 0
1x WD 1TB Green

I use the raid for Apps/Games and the Green for storage which I back up onto an external drive. I used to have a 150GB raptor as my OS drive and it was fast but soooooo noisy and the new raid array feels as quick as is silent.

As long as the only things on the array are OS/Apps/Games then if the array goes down you just have to reinstall and you've lost no vital data (except maybe for saved games which you can add to your backup schedule anyway).

The 640's are a bit big for raid 0 IMHO as that's ~1TB in total which is huge for OS/Apps/Games, that's why people look at the WD 250's or 320's for raid 0 which still gives you loads of space.

Have a look at the 320GB RE3 in raid 0 thread for some more info.