Age old question. I have a boot disk (500gb) and a spare 500gb I have no use for. But now I'm thinking of RAIDing the 2 together and installing my games there. Which RAID setup would give the best performance boost? I dont expect much more from saving stuff, But loading is a real bottleneck in a lot of my games. Just getting a new cpu tomorrow so hoping to improve both load times and processing times at the same... ummm... time.
Raid question
- Thread starter oxygene
- Start date
the only raid set up that will give u any performance enhancement will be raid 0. tho bear in mind that if either of the drives dies then you effectively loss all data across both. a quick read up on wikipedia should explain better. hope this helps
Sweet. I guess the next step is to figure out how to onboard raid works on this motherboard. Prolly a bios switch. On reflection, would I need to reinstall windows on the raid once its set up, or could I set it up to spread the curretn system over a new array?
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As mentioned above, RAID 0 will give a performance boost but will dramatically reduce the safety of your data. One drive corrupts or the array goes bad, then it will be hard or impossible to recover the data. If it's for gaming only, then it should be fine. If not, then make sure you do constant backups. I found my array to be reliable with no failures.
Don't expect huge performance gains however - seek times can actually be slower, only sequential reads/writes really benefit hugely. It helps with servers, but general desktop use and gaming you won't notice much benefit. The faster read and writes are offset by the latency and seek times increasing. Large maps should load quicker. Multiple read and write requests are quicker. Definitely worth trying out however to see what you think.
Don't expect huge performance gains however - seek times can actually be slower, only sequential reads/writes really benefit hugely. It helps with servers, but general desktop use and gaming you won't notice much benefit. The faster read and writes are offset by the latency and seek times increasing. Large maps should load quicker. Multiple read and write requests are quicker. Definitely worth trying out however to see what you think.