Raid 0

drak3 · 15 May 2006 at 15:25

whats an appropriate stripe size for games in raid 0?

woodsy2k · 15 May 2006 at 17:06

Umm i would say two 80GBs would do the job nicely.

Wouldnt really want to go any bigger really as its just a waste. Unless you can see yourself filling essentiall 148GB of just games?!

jbloggs · 15 May 2006 at 19:51

drak3:

I use a stripe size of 32KB, and a cluster size of 4KB, games run fine with this.

I suppose being a bit more "specific" about it, the larger the files within the game the larger the stripe size should be, ie a 32KB stripe is a good size for small files, like Windows XP.

ChrisLX200 · 16 May 2006 at 08:10

Yeah, it depends on your average file sizes. Some games (like FlightSim2004) use lots of smaller files and I would select a smaller stripe - like 16KB, others use big DAT files and 64KB or even 128KB might be better. If you use a big stripe the worst you'll get is the performance of 1 disk as a lot of files won't get split, use a tiny stripe (like 2KB) and you reduce performance for all files much bigger than that as it will be broken up into lots of bits.

Personally I wouldn't use RAID anyway, but that's another question

Bones · 16 May 2006 at 12:03

why would you not use RAID for games? i have just got another 37.5gb raptor and plan on using it in RAID 0 for a windows install and games partition.

R@tman · 16 May 2006 at 12:11

i got 2 SATA 80gb maxtors in raid 0 im using 16 k stripe and im not convinced theres much performance gain over not running them in raid

smids · 16 May 2006 at 12:25

16K really if you don't game and want a nippy windows.
32K for a mixture of both nippy wnidows and games.
64/128K for pure gaming speed - this is pointless though as how often do you actually utilise the HDU in games? Makes much more sense to go for 32K as this is a middle road for both.

ChrisLX200 · 16 May 2006 at 12:40

Bones said:
why would you not use RAID for games? i have just got another 37.5gb raptor and plan on using it in RAID 0 for a windows install and games partition.

I had used RAID for many years, both RAID0, 1 and 0+1. I just got fed up with it going wrong - plus (when I finally realised RAID0 was just too risky) having 2 additional drives running as mirrors is an inefficient method of keeping backup information (no compression). Can't say I miss it now I don't use RAID.