Raid 0 + gaming = no benefit

[JIMINATOR]

saw an interesting article in maximum pc today. they had seen that anandtech was reporting no benefit to games with raid 0 configuration. so they did a lot of tests with a lot of different configurations and came up with the same results. so raid 0 will help where you have apps that load huge blocks of data, but for games where quick random access is most important, the raid 0 can actually cause a hit in speed....

[Caged Anger]

What is RAID 0?

[EXEcution]

What is RAID 0?
"raid 0 will help where you have apps that load huge blocks of data"
;)

[OUTLAWS high ping camper]

yeah, I found that out the hard way.......2 10,000 rpm raptors in a raid 0 config = $ for nothing......

[Grimmy]

yeah, I found that out the hard way.......2 10,000 rpm raptors in a raid 0 config = $ for nothing......
Can you unraid them and then have 2 HDs to use?

[JIMINATOR]

there really isn't any purpose to that, ie: 2 80 gig drives = 1 160 gig raid drive. IMO the one drive is easier to use than the two...

[Fragetti]

What is RAID 0?
RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives." The concept was pioneered through academic research funded by Digital Equipment Corporation (http://www.digital.com/) (the creators of OpenVMS) and has become a standard in the computing industry for applications requiring fast, reliable storage of large volumes of data.

There are several different types of RAID configurations which are described in terms of "levels." The various levels of RAID storage are as follows:


RAID0 (http://www.utexas.edu/cc/vms/about/raid0.html) writes data across the drives in the array, one segment at a time. This configuration is also referred to as "striping." Striping offers high I/O rates since read/write operations may be performed simultaneously on multiple drives.
RAID1 (http://www.utexas.edu/cc/vms/about/raid1.html) writes data to two drives simultaneously. If one drive fails, data can still be retrieved from the other member of the RAID set. This process is also called "mirroring." Mirroring is the most expensive RAID option (since it doubles storage requirements), but it offers the ultimate in reliability.
RAID 0+1 (http://www.utexas.edu/cc/vms/about/raid01.html) is a combination of striping and mirroring. This configuration provides optimal speed and reliablility, but possesses the same cost problem as RAID1.
RAID5 (http://www.utexas.edu/cc/vms/about/raid5.html) employs a combination of striping and parity checking. The use of parity checking provides redundancy without the overhead of having to double disk capacity. Simply put, parity checking involves determining whether each given block has an odd or even value. These values are summed across the stripe sets to obtain a parity value. With this parity value, the contents of a failed disk can easily be determined and rebuilt on a spare drive.


Can you unraid them and then have 2 HDs to use?
Yes but not with out some backing up and a re-install of the OS :(

Frag

[Death Engineer]

Props to Fragetti for answering the question well (and for linking to UT's website ;)).

[OUTLAWS high ping camper]

Raid 0 (striping) has it downside. If one of the drives fails, you loose everything.

In answer to Grimmy's question: Yes, I could start all over and have 2 seperate drives.

[Fragetti]

Raid 0 (striping) has it downside. If one of the drives fails, you loose everything.

In answer to Grimmy's question: Yes, I could start all over and have 2 seperate drives.
Dont I know it :mad: one of my first raid systems lost a WD HD everything gone. :D So now I run a 80 gig kicker drive for backup. You can uses four drivers and mirror but that seems like a wast. like my new rig am runnig a
AMD64 3200 on an ASUS KV8 Deluxe a gig ram running two Maxtor 160 gig SATA Raid (Via 6420 chip set) acording to Sandra pro am getting a bufferd read of 126 meg per sec and a a wright speed of 123 mps. that was a quick test and I had a bunch of stuff running. that was a 1025 meg test file.

[ME BIGGD01]

i thought i mentioned this subject in a previous post of mine but maybe that got lost. there is alot to know about raid and these raid setups that come bundled with you motheboard are not what professionals use for raid. i will say that if configured right with cluster size and the right type of raid , you could get a good boost but only if you are using large files. a gamer will not see any benifit but if you are into video editing, running server, or other LFA, you will see the differences.

i am looking at the new sata2 hard drives soon to be released. i would say around febuary next year, i will be building another system based on the nforce4 and pciexpress, sata2.