worth it going raid ?

Gaming; no. Spend double on a better drive or save to an ssd and symlink your favourite games onto it.

Data loss isn't the main reason its not worth it, it is just that your access times do not go up at all- raid only comes into its own when you are pulling long continuous streams of data from a drive, even with game level loading- hear how your drive is searching nearly all the time?

Conventional drives (platter) suffer from access times, if you are looking at a conventional raid array my personal opinion, having nearly been there myself and looked a fair amount is it is really not worth it, the slight reduction in level loading times, and it is slight, doesnt justify doubling the cost of your storage.

SSDs however might be different, because they can get to the data in next to no time, RAID is probably worth a lot more as the issue with access times still holding things up is gone.

I didn't get raid but bagged a conventional drive and an 80gb intel, best pc purchase made in ages. See my sig for the setup.
 
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the drive thats in my first post of this thread , i cannot afford the biggest ssd so which normal drive is the best speed wise for gaming ?
 
sry edited my first post.

To be frank you are not going to see much improvement in terms of gaming without going to ssd.

With the other platter drives, if you already have one that works...best leave it, you won't see a big improvement with any platter drive.

The f3 samsungs are fastest, the WD caviar blacks are close behind, and as you go to the bigger, more expensive drives they do get a bit faster. 1tb samsung f3 seems to be the sweetspot. But honestly, it aint worth £60 if all you need is a performance increase.
i cannot afford the biggest ssd
Click to expand...

What do you mean by this- that you cant afford ANY ssd or just that you can't afford the BIGGEST, which no one can dude!
 
You don't need a massive SSD, get a medium sized one and only keep what you are actually playing on it. My 80GB drive had enough space for Win7 + Apps + around 5 big games. Everything else was moved onto mechanical drives and i rotated out games i was no longer playing.
I'd be surprised if you regularly play more than a couple of different games in a given week.

You can use Symlinks if you have a lot of steam games.
 
You don't need a massive SSD, get a medium sized one and only keep what you are actually playing on it. My 80GB drive had enough space for Win7 + Apps + around 5 big games. Everything else was moved onto mechanical drives and i rotated out games i was no longer playing.
I'd be surprised if you regularly play more than a couple of different games in a given week.

You can use Symlinks if you have a lot of steam games.
Click to expand...

+1 what that guy said.
 
i think the ssd's are overpriced for what you get though , how is putting my os on a ssd drive going to help game load times ? . i have 141gb of games etc on my drive atm , even the 100gb ssd's are over £250
 
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No dude, you dont need to put your steam folder fully on the ssd.

Having os and apps on there is brilliant. Then do what me and zarf did. Create the steam file on a partition (the first one so it is shortstroked there) on your platter drive.

Games that you play often, say your top 5, you copy and paste the data files out of steam on the platter and onto the partition on your, say 80gb ssd.

Then using command prompt you make a symlink, a kind of shortcut for programmes, that will sit on your platter drive where the main games directory is, when you go to access the game, the OS will be told to look on your ssd- this gives ssd performance, for all the apps and games you use.

On an intel I have OS, apps, civ 4, napoleon total war and battlefield 2. Still have 23 gig spare. I spend 95%+ of my time using only the data on my ssd.

My platter drive holds the backup of my steam folder and the rest of it plus my data. If you do want to use a game you dont play so often, you can just play it off the platter- odds are it ll be an older one and it will load very fast anyhow.

All the benefits of an ssd, but you use far far less capacity, and trust me, you notice the difference.
 
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