Up until now, I've never used RAID but in the spirit of trying something new, I'm thinking of the following for a possible future build.
2x 74Gb Raptors in Raid 0 for O/S and installed apps/games. This array split into two partitions: 20Gb for O/S (C: drive) and 128Gb for installed apps (D: drive).
2x 320Gb 7200.10 Seagates in Raid 1 for storage (mp3s, important docs, isos, etc). This would be E: drive (320Gb)
The RAID 1 is obviously there for redundancy as I've never had a decent back-up strategy and this would give me some peace of mind.
I now have the following questions:
1) Do I understand correctly that for the RAID 0 array, striping two raptors wouldn't really show a noticeable benefit to game loading times or app speeds unless doing video editing or such like due to the limiting factor being seek/access times rather than transfer speed?
2) I rip all my games to isos on my storage drive so I don't need CDs and it's here that I 'm thinking having the raptors in RAID 0 might show some benefit. When installing isos from E: to D:, the improved RAID 1 read speeds on the storage drive, would make use of the improved RAID 0 write speeds? Is this correct?
2) Would the strategy of having a separate boot partition and installed app partition on the raptors be a good one?
3) What about the swap file, should I make another partition on the raptors for this or put the swap on C:, D: or E: ?
4) I'm planning on getting Vista as soon as it comes out but want to be able to boot it separately from XP whilst issues/drivers are sorted out. How difficult would this be to implement with the disk set/up above? Presumably I would want a further partition on the raptors to install vista on?
5) Could vista then share the installed apps folder (D: drive) with XP? (I'm assuming here that apps would need to be installed physically twice to this drive if they were to be used by the two different O/Ss rather than both O/Ss sharing the same install)
2x 74Gb Raptors in Raid 0 for O/S and installed apps/games. This array split into two partitions: 20Gb for O/S (C: drive) and 128Gb for installed apps (D: drive).
2x 320Gb 7200.10 Seagates in Raid 1 for storage (mp3s, important docs, isos, etc). This would be E: drive (320Gb)
The RAID 1 is obviously there for redundancy as I've never had a decent back-up strategy and this would give me some peace of mind.
I now have the following questions:
1) Do I understand correctly that for the RAID 0 array, striping two raptors wouldn't really show a noticeable benefit to game loading times or app speeds unless doing video editing or such like due to the limiting factor being seek/access times rather than transfer speed?
2) I rip all my games to isos on my storage drive so I don't need CDs and it's here that I 'm thinking having the raptors in RAID 0 might show some benefit. When installing isos from E: to D:, the improved RAID 1 read speeds on the storage drive, would make use of the improved RAID 0 write speeds? Is this correct?
2) Would the strategy of having a separate boot partition and installed app partition on the raptors be a good one?
3) What about the swap file, should I make another partition on the raptors for this or put the swap on C:, D: or E: ?
4) I'm planning on getting Vista as soon as it comes out but want to be able to boot it separately from XP whilst issues/drivers are sorted out. How difficult would this be to implement with the disk set/up above? Presumably I would want a further partition on the raptors to install vista on?
5) Could vista then share the installed apps folder (D: drive) with XP? (I'm assuming here that apps would need to be installed physically twice to this drive if they were to be used by the two different O/Ss rather than both O/Ss sharing the same install)
