Is RAID worth it?

Hey guys.
I was thinking about "upgrading" my comp and getting a second hard drive (Hitachi T7K250 [160GB] ) and setting it up in a RAID-0. Now, before you guys kill me, yes I know that it cuts the mean life in half for the hard drives, and that if I lose my data on one its all gone. My question isn't about reliablity, but rather about performance gain.

I remember reading an Anandtech article that stated that RAID is not worth it for single user environments, but as much as I (and others) trust Anandtech, I still can't help but read so many users on so many forums praise their performance with RAID 0. Is there really a noticeable performance increase?? I'm not talking about synthetic benchmarks, because I could care less about those. I'm asking in real world, single user activity. (i.e. loading times in games/windows/overall speediness)

Thanks for any advice/words of truth/help!

 

I do some gaming. What I was thinking was that maybe I should get a WD Raptor and make that my boot/program drive, while my main 160GB drive would be my media/files drive.

The only thing about the Raptor is that it is STILL expensive, which is why I just wanted to do a RAID with another hard drive like mine. It would be about $50-70 cheaper and according to some people would be "just as fast" as a single Raptor..........??

 

It doesn't cut anything in half. It may double your chance of a failure as there obviously two drives, but drives are extremely reliable these days.

There is a performance increase if you choose the right drives and you have modern hardware.

As far as the AnandTech article, that's someones' opinion.

No one can say whether it's "not worth it for single user environments" or is.

They don't know your setup and expectations etc.

 

I worded it improperly, but thats essentially the gist of it. Having two drives in RAID 0 essentially halves their life time.

Quote from Anandtech: " If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop."

Conclusion : "Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth."

So there you (and I) go. I have read this article and know about it, but I'm just asking for more opinions on this topic because I simply can't believe that so many people would say "Yeah, RAID-0 made my comp so much faster" while Anandtech essentially says that it actually does nothing in single user environments.

So, any other opinions?

 

That's because it's variable and depends on hardware.

Unless you have exactly the same computer, which isn't probable, then reviews are a dime a dozen in my opinion.

I've installed RAID 0 on machines where it has made a dramatic difference, especially in boot times and game loading, and on others it hasn't done much.

Post your exact specs and you will get much more relevant opinions.

 

Personally, I see no noticeable difference in boot times or game loading times at all.

I hear RAID 0 really helps with video editing because you are constantly reading and writing to the hard drive.

But for anything other than that, I would say doubling the chance of failure is just not worth the hassle. I've actually been meaning to remove my RAID array and just use my 250Gb drive, but I just haven't found the time yet.

 

I have mixed opinions on raid. If it's for backup purposes, yes it's great (raid 1).

Raid 0 is also great, you will notice an increase in speed when you load big applications from your HDDs. Or if you're encoding MP3s, it's quicker.

With raid 0 on my main PC the real time speed of my HDDs is 75mb/s. A single 7200rpm drive would be about half that.

 

Here are my hardware specs to help you guys out:

AMD Athlon-64 3000+ (Running at 3500+ speeds) Venice Core
1 GB Dual Channel Corsair DDR-400
1 Hitachi T7K250 160GB SATA Hard drive
ATI Radeon X800 XL 256MB PCI-E
Windows XP Professional SP2
(I don't think I need to post any of my optical drives

You're right Insomniac abou the hardware not being exactly the same, but in this case, Anandtech RAIDed two Raptors, which is perhaps the "ultimate" RAID setup and still they claimed that it wasn't worth it. I'm assuming that if you tested a few RAID setups on a fresh install of Windows XP that the results wouldn't be so wacky. It is odd that for some comps it makes little or no difference but for others it makes a huge difference, which is part of what this post is about. Finding out what the heck determines such a difference.

 

The reason they deemed it "not worth it" is because the speed increase is only going to affect a small fraction of the huge number of possible tasks performed on a PC.

It only affects read/write/retrieve speeds of your HDD(s). Not overall speed of your PC (thats up to your CPU, which is already fast). So I guess if you have a fast CPU, you do not need RAID.

Let me rephrase that. The only time you notice a speed increase with RAID 0 is when your CPU "talks" to your HDDs and asks them for some info, or gives them info. Only when this "exchange" takes place, will you notice a difference in how fast your HDD can perform whatever it is that the CPU is asking it to do.

I think that is fairly obvious though isn't it.

 

So, in my case RAID wouldn't be worth it......That's what I figured.

Let me change the question, then.

Would buying a Raptor (74GB) and making that my boot/windows/program drive and then making my other 160GB drive a storage drive be worth it? The Raptors are still a bit expensive, but would that actually show significant performance gains?

 

Yes that's a great idea.

 

Thanks for everyone's help! (especially you, Prophets).