to RAID or not....

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Marklar Marklar, Dec 19, 2005.

  1. Marklar Marklar

    Marklar Marklar Marklar

    I am currently using a Western Dig. 36gig raptor drive as my primary and an older ATA samsung 80 gig for storage. I have no experience with Raid and am curious to find out if adding another raptor 36 gig drive in a Raid setup would be worthwhile.
    My pc is used for gaming and personal buisness, only a very small amount of my data is sensitive so I am not overly concerned about drive failure. My chipset does not support raid so I will also need advice on what card to look at.

    Thanks y'all
     
  2. Prophets21

    Prophets21 Staff Sergeant

    It's well worth it, especially with your 10k rpm drives. You would see a big improvement in load times.
     
  3. Marklar Marklar

    Marklar Marklar Marklar

    Thanks,

    Can anyone suggest a prticular RAID controller, and a good resource for setup instructions etc....
     
  4. Wyatt_Earp

    Wyatt_Earp MajorGeek

  5. DavidGP

    DavidGP MajorGeeks Forum Administrator - Grand Pooh-Bah Staff Member

    With a Raptor I wouldnt bother as Wyatt said your only going to see some inprovement in bootup/load times and in games its not going to speed them up or increase the load time of levels ( I have raid0 and its still damm slow to load a new level up in FarCry etc ).

    Wouldnt be so bad if you wanted to play with raid if you didnt have to buy a raid card but I personally wouldnt go through the hassle, raid generally only speeds up graphical work, video editing etc
     
  6. Marklar Marklar

    Marklar Marklar Marklar

    Thanks guys,
    I'll take your advice on this and wont be going with raid. This is the first machine I built, and it happend piecemeal- I did not start out with a plan to build my own, I am pretty happy with the machine and would like to ask as a side note, is there any thing that comes to mind for you guys that I am missing for a gaming machine? other than substantial upgrades of gpu,cpu or drives.
     
  7. Prophets21

    Prophets21 Staff Sergeant

    Well even though people say RAID is not worth it, for the hassle of actually getting the array setup is not worth it for the performance increase...
    I would disagree...I think for todays games you need that extra speed.

    For example, in GTA San Andreas...if you have a slow hard drive, you get a bit of "pop up" scenery, I.E. the HDD cannot process the scenery as fast as you are driving. This is just one way that HDDs can affect performance in games.

    Also, if you play a lot of CS:S you'll know that the loading times can be bad at times. With RAID 0 I am nearly always first when loading a new map, same with Battlefield 2.

    I see that Halos and and Wyatts responses have swayed your decision somewhat, but I urge you to at least try it out. Even 10% is a noticable difference. :)
     
  8. Adrynalyne

    Adrynalyne Guest

    If your games are being affected by RAID, then there are some serious bottlenecks on the system, most likely in the ram department. If I had money to waste I would use RAID, but only because I like fast boot times and don't enjoy waiting for programs to load up for the first time. Any other time is inconsequental if you have enough ram.
     
  9. Prophets21

    Prophets21 Staff Sergeant

    Why would HDD load times be affected at all by other components?
     
  10. Adrynalyne

    Adrynalyne Guest

    You miss the point. Your HDD shouldn't be a factor in games. If it is, you have a bottleneck somewhere, causing the game to page the hard disk. That will be slow no matter what. HDD load times are irrelevant. Its the slowest device on the system.
     
  11. DavidGP

    DavidGP MajorGeeks Forum Administrator - Grand Pooh-Bah Staff Member

    Think of the answer for a second......... where does the data from the HDD go?

    I'm not a heavy gamer by any means but I've not come across as game that works any quicker because of raid, game speed is determined by your cpu, ram and more important the gpu. Raid helps yes in a slightly quicker bootup time... my Raid0 system boots in no time, and for processing large files works great, but doesnt help in the speed of apps only their load times.

    I have been playing with raid for near 4yrs, but still would if you didnt already have hardware capable of raid urge you to use the money for something else, if you have the hardware already then great play away, plus another noteable fact is raid0 is better with more than 2HDs in the array.
     
  12. Prophets21

    Prophets21 Staff Sergeant

    If you're going for more than 2 HDDs you mayaswell go with 1+0 or 5.
     

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