To RAID or not to RAID

jesin

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Oct 18, 2013
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I have an Asus M4A78LT-M LE motherboard+AMD Phenom II(4 cores) processor and 2 x Seagate 160GB SATA hard disks. I'll be using this PC only for gaming.

Is it worth to setup RAID 0 with these using the motherboard's onboard RAID controller?

I've read that using onboard RAID has very little performance benefits. So which setup is better

Two HDDs in RAID0

or

Installing the OS in HDD1 and installing games and other applications on HDD2

or

Setting up software RAID in Windows.
 
Solution
Be aware that if one drive in the array (RAID 0) goes out, you lose all your data on the array. Also, for gaming I can't see it making much of a difference. If you did video editing, it would be more practical.

jesin

Honorable
Oct 18, 2013
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Thanks for the replies jbseven and Hawkeye22.

Be aware that if one drive in the array (RAID 0) goes out, you lose all your data on the array.

@Hawkeye22 I'm well aware of this fact, what is want is pure performance.

Also, for gaming I can't see it making much of a difference. If you did video editing, it would be more practical.

Why is it so? Is it because gaming requires more disk reading and video editing more disk writing?
 

jbseven

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Dec 2, 2011
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The performance gains of raid 0 on mechanical hard drives for gaming is only slight compared to say a single ssd or a raid0 ssd configuration. Video editing is a lengthy process and in such situations, every bit of extra MB/s helps.