READ: RAID 0 - good or bad for games?

[TechZ]

- RAID arrays still has dominance when it comes to professional multimedia applications. It offers *much* faster I/O performance then a stand alone drive. The advent of SATA could be a herald of some technology breakthrough looming in the not-too-distant future. When you add Native Command Queuing into the mix the performance only increases.

[SolApathy]

Unless you are involved in heavy-duty audio/video editing RAID 0 reall does not improve performance in a notacable way. Don't get me wrong, drive access speeds are increased, but unless you are using it for things that will require major drive read/write operations it will not do you much good.


...then again it might sound cool :þ



...In addition, RAID 0 offers no redundancy & is more prone to data loss. If you are going to go the RAID route you should consider RAID 0+1, as it will add redundancy to your striped drives.



As quote from another source-

reliability (as measured by mean time between failures (MTBF)) decreases linearly with the number of members—so a set of two disks is half as reliable as a single disk. The reason for this is that the file system is distributed across all disks. When a drive fails the file system cannot cope with such a large loss of data and coherency since the data is "striped" across all drives. Data can be recovered using special tools, however it will be incomplete and most likely corrupt.

[Larommi]

It helps my load times while playing battlefield '42

[Six Eyed Smily]

it helps, but not enough to be worth it imo. go for a wd 72gb raptor II, and it will still be faster than a raid 0 array (using basic drives) for games, whilst being cheaper, less risky and less fuss.

(side note: the main problem with raid is that unless you have a proper stand alone raid controller, which excludes most on-motherboard controllers, the extra cpu power required means that you dont really gain as much performance as you would think)

[clauded]

gaming is the main thing were you gain using raid0 which i have been using on my main machine for some time,works great

[SolApathy]

gaming is the main thing were you gain using raid0 which i have been using on my main machine for some time,works great

http://www.overclockers.com/articles1063/

As you will see on page 2 of this article, load times are not improved all that much. As I stated before, unless you are invlved in heavy read/write accress you will not really see a noticable difference in performance...


...Here is another interesting article for those considering RAID on a home system

http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Stora...r-Your-Home-PC

[TechZ]

My money, I would get a Raptor, all round speed.

[Radical Dreamer]

I could care less what those benchmarks say, I can notice the improvement in speed.

[SolApathy]

Well I run 2 200GB SATA/150's on this machine right now, on seperate channels for gaming, and use a RAID 0+1 setup with 4 maxtor 120GB/16mb cache for my AV editing on my other machine. I used to run raid 0 on my gaming machine, but never saw a noticable gain in performance that would make the lack of redundancy worth it.

[Gabriel]

Hi All,
If you are really bothered by disk performance (and reliabilty), i suggest you stop looking into the PATA, SATA (standalone or raid0).
my simple suggestion is to go on a good SCSI based sollution - A stand alone Seagate Ultra320 15K RPM disk will most likely perform better than any P/S-ATA storage.


Hope I helped you all,
Gabriel

[Gabriel]

reliability (as measured by mean time between failures (MTBF))........

One more thing about MTBF, MTBF alone is not a certificate of reliabilty. whats important is in what condition the MTBF test is done.
For example - in order to achieve 300,000 MTBF class, one can take 1000 Drives and operate the for a 300 Hours(~13days). So before everyone shouts "MTBF" you should really know how the manufacturers are conducting such tests.
you'll never know what was the number of "test subject", relative humidity, ambient teprature on the site of the test or even the EMI status of the room it has bee conducted.

in short - MTBF (without know about the process) is BS.

Thanks,
Gabriel

[Six Eyed Smily]

Hi All,
If you are really bothered by disk performance (and reliabilty), i suggest you stop looking into the PATA, SATA (standalone or raid0).
my simple suggestion is to go on a good SCSI based sollution - A stand alone Seagate Ultra320 15K RPM disk will most likely perform better than any P/S-ATA storage.


Hope I helped you all,
Gabriel

note that for desktop apps, including games the wd raptor II is faster than these scsi disks, as they are optimised for server operations (primarily database applications) and do not perform as well in games.

if you really want speed, two raptor II drives in raid 0 will be very very fast, particularly with a decent hardware raid controller.

however, i still hold that for games your money is better spent on a faster cpu, more ram or better graphics, you will get more performace for your money.

[ilovetheusers]

Evidence shows that raid 0 does not help. I thought I noticed a difference in my machine but I think it depends upon the raid card you get. Sure, if you use the build it raid on a motherboard or get a cheap card (like I got) it's going to use a lot more CPU cycles and it's going to give no better performance in games that are CPU intensive when loading (DX 9 games).

I got a WD raptor 74gb 10,000rpm and it's a hell of a lot better (and louder) than my two WD 80gb 8mb cache drives raided in 0.

I have religated my raid array to my video/phot editing/file sharing machine. It helps a ton with that.

[FireAm94]

Ditto on the Raptor 74GB. I have one and it's more than fast enough.

Joe