Am going to reformat my drives and do me a clean install of vista 64 home prem with 4gb 6400 ram.
Currently my 2 500gb drives in raid 0. I know there is more risk of failure having them like this.
Is there much speed diff with raid 0. If not I will disable the raid when doing my clean install and may add a 36gb or 74gb raptor instead.
I do know everything, just not all at once. It's a virtual memory problem.
Everyone has their own views.
Try HDTach (google it) and it will give comparisons.
THe only thing that is right is that 2xnormal Sata drives RAID 0 will be quicker (and considerably quieter and cheaper) than a Raptor.
What ever you decide to go for ensure that you back your data up to an external source.
"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be." Frank Zappa. ----------- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." Huang Po.----------- "A drowsy line of wasted time bathes my open mind", - Ride.
One thing is for sure is that a 36gb or 74gb raptor is definitely NOT worth the bother in any way.
You get a nice increase in read and write speed.
Seek speed doesn't change much. You will only notice the difference if you do work which relies on large HD I/O.
Originally Posted by Saracen
I've used it in the past, did notice the difference (with large files especially & large data access) - but i had a few failures, which (the last one) ended ultimately with the loss off my data, and the drives).
For a boot drive a single Raptor makes more sense, though the 36GB one is too limited to be of any real use (saying as you could only install Windows on it and not an awful lot more). 74GB would be fine for most use, with a larger drive for everything that isn't critical for speed.
When considering a boot drive, don't bother looking at transfer rates, as they mean nothing. It's all about access time, and RAID0 can't possibly decrease that (in theory it can only slow access rate).
For anything else it depends on your situation. Reading large contiguous files? RAID0 might be of some benefit. Reading lots of smaller files (.dlls fall into this category, so don't be fooled by that 600MB Office directory) then a single fast drive is better.
I noticed a difference in load times for games with RAID0, but it is easy to go wrong as well as drive failures...
see http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...t-died-me.html for what happened today - short version is bios update knackered RAID setup
(stupid is referring to me btw)
I'm currently trying to work out whether it's worth it or not. I thought I'd be happy with losing non-vital stuff like an OS install and data I can get back (games, music rips from my cd's etc...) but now it's happened, I'm annoyed. Maybe it's just cos it happened quicker than I thought it might, though I guess that's a blessing in itself as there was far less on the striped partition. Maybe it's just because I feel it's my own stupid fault.
but am I annoyed enough to outweigh the noticeable (but not huge) speed increase?????? Think I'll sleep on it
Thing is, I've got, hmm... 5 harddrives in this computer:
2x200gb = RAID0 = WinXP
1x200gb = Windows Vista
1x120gb = Ubuntu
1x80gb = music/videos/backup stuff here..
so the 'important' stuff is on the 80gb (i really should get a cheap external to backup that too) and all thats on the RAID0 partition is XP and games etc so if anything goes wrong its not the end of the world. plus I can boot vista/ubuntu for any recovery stuff if necessary
Access times may actually increase. transfer rate will roughly double, but it depends on usage. If you are whipping large files around between disks (so you need at least 4 disks to see the full speed) then it's worth it.
Loading games etc.. is usually quicker off a single raptor (sorry to differ), access time is around 5ms, transfer rate of 80MB/sec is more than fast enough.
Last edited by sjbuck; 13-02-2008 at 09:08 PM.
I agree with the above, although 'etc' does exclude loading Windows (highly optimised for sequential transfer since XP).
I have 5 drives in my main machine. Two identical 500GB pairs configured as Intel Matrix RAID with a RAID 0 partition for OS (Imaged and quickly recoverable) and RAID 1 partition for data on pair 1 and RAID 0 partition for Flight Sim stuff (Imaged and quickly recoverable) and RAID 1 partition for data. Plus a single 320Gb drive with another install of OS for recovery booting and dabbling.
RAID 0 is faster according to diagnostics…. But may not be that noticeable much in real life, but so what – it should be faster, and is a bit of fun
Try to make each and every day the best it can be.
I never saw a speed increase with Read....games loaded same speed, XP booted slower cos of the RAID array hardware...
but it DOES WRITE faster...so if you're making films, ie saving game movie with FRAPS, RAID is good.
But.... I don't see it as faster for many people, not after a year or more of use. It fragments it's nipples off.
... yes I defrag very frequently....
Try to make each and every day the best it can be.
Ive never really used raid. I currently have a 300 gig maxtor drive and a 500 gig samsung spinpoint and they are fast enough for me.
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