My apologies for what must be a common question, but it is not in the relevant FAQ.
I am only concerned with gaming performance and loading times - not really bothered if file transfers, or installation times are improved. Hence,
1) Will RAID 0 improve performance while gaming in any way?
2) Will RAID 0 reduce loading times significantly when starting up a program or changing level?
Thanks for your patience.    

1. Depends. On some games yes, but some no.
2. Yes
 
Raid 0 has a great I/O performance on large blocks file size for example on editing movies.

Its hard to justify the cost when the precious dolars could be otherwise sunk into a better GPU investment, my take on RAID and games.
Best vid card and one good SATA disk, youre golden.

for gaming, the actual boost raid offers is NOT significant... hovering around a 15% improvement in the best cases with 2 drives, instead of just 1... i dont understand the reasons for that myself... ...but, for gaming... if you want performance similar to raid, just get a fast single drive... ...i have raid 0 setup myself in my system, with 2*36GB raptors... games dont load much faster at all,  though windows boots up in about than half the time, and defragging windows with these 2 drives in raid 0  gets about 32MB/s (i tend to reboot and defrag more than playing games to be honest, so i can definetly see a benefit, for me)... again, i dont understand entirely why it varies from usage to usage... but, thats just the case as it is...
 
so, my advice, just go with the fastest single drive youre willing to spend money on, and it should perform similar [to raid 0] for the usage youre wanting... drives that use perpendicular recording i hear are pretty fast, so, if you can find a 7200.10 of large capacity, you should be good to go, as the larger the drive is, the faster data can be read/written, ie, higher STR (sustained transfer rates)
 
a comment about raptors though, theyre an excellent OS drive, if anything, because there are often files that need to be accessed quickly, and its low access times greatly help with that

Well, in my case, I've put as much money as I can on the GPU and CPU and a single HDD, so it comes down to whether or not it's worth getting a second drive for a RAID 0. This is for a laptop as well...
Good solid data about performance gains in games and loading times would be welcomed.

well, i looked for about 10 seconds on google and found this http://www.overclockers.com/articles1063/ its one comparison between running a single raptor 36GB and a pair in raid 0, for game loading times and other tests ...im sure you can find many more articles though
 
i just typed in "raid 0 game loading time"

RAID 0, unless you use a dedicated controller card with its own cache, has *no* benefits on the desktop. The additional overhead for doing the read/writes can result in increased loading times.
 
For certain games, where data is being streamed from disk and the CPU is doing no work on it at all - just data being spooled - then you may see a very slight improvement.
 
You're much better off with a single Raptor.

Thank you choirbass and mkaibear. I wish there were Raptors for the notebook. 7200 will have to do!
Cheers.

Some would argue that raid 0 is not worth the price, but it does reduce loading nonetheless.

 
Has any of you actually ever used a RAID system on a desktop? The guy is not talking about video editing or something serious. And even in the simplest cases, yes RAID 0 can bring huge benefits. I will bring out the simple experience i had with my older system. Spellforce took about 1min 10secs to load a level. After RAIDing my 2 IDE drives it took less than 25secs for the same levels!! That is close to 3 times as fast. Of course other loading times did not have that significant impact, but still the whole experience is so positive, i can't go back to using a single drive, not even a Raptor. Get two cheap fast SATA drives, RAID them in 0 and off you go! The only downside of the situation is the parity and you have to remember to backup your important data!!! And for God's shake, cool the drivers properly! I can't stand listening to people whinning about how bad RAID 0 is because they lost all their data, but they couldn't be bothered cooling the drives not even with a single fan!

lol, yes... i have, and i am currently... ive almost always used raid in my systems when the opportunity presented itself (have yet to experience a failure while using raid, though not because of raid by any means, obviously), also because i already had all of the essential data backed up, making regular backups anyhow... so in all cases [for me] there were only benefits to having it... but, going back to what was being discussed originally... game loading times do not substantially improve... maybe for older games there was an increase, for whatever reason... but, by no means will you find your load times cut in half, or even close, when playing current games...  
 
you said at first that with a single drive, it took 1:10 seconds to load... and with 2 drives in raid 0, made it nearly 3 times faster... down to :25... ...TBH, with 2 drives, compared to 1, you can expect, at best, theoretically even, to have exactly double the performance, but triple the performance..

Aaaaaaaand we're back to experiential evidence instead of actual science...
 
Seriously, darkguset, have a look at some of the articles out there talking about RAID on the desktop. They show, absolutely, that there is no performance benefit except in certain largely artificial situations for using RAID on the desktop.
 
And claiming that you get a "close to 3 times as fast" from RAIDing 2 hard drives, when even synthetic STR benchmarks will only ever show <2 times as fast, smacks of ridiculousness.

well, you cant say there are no benefits... i can say right away, that there are... just one example though, boot times, those are close to cut in half compared to a single drive (when using 2 drives)... other than that though, i agree for the most part

I'd class "boot times" in with the "certain largely artificial situations" - booting is as close to a synthetic Sequential Transfer Rate benchmark as you're ever going to get in the real world - it's basically just spooling stuff to memory.
 
Fair point, though - Windows will boot faster.

RAID 0 is marginally useful in games, but thats not what it was designed for. You also have to deal with an increased seek time, even if throughput is faster, so if your moving many small files, that might also cause a hamper on performance, but either way, not by much.
 
I say, if you have 2 drives, RAID them together, but don't go out of your way to do so.
 
And I don't even want to know what darkguset is taking...

 
Mate, what you are saying comes to the limits of ridiculousness. You are stating that you don't believe what you are experiencing because theory tells something else! That specific game behaved in that way on my specific system. It took the loading times almost 3 times down. Now regarding windows boot times as others mentioned, it only took them maybe 2 seconds down, no more. Why RAID affected that game so much, i don't know, i didn't investigate, but one thing is for sure. It happened and whatever you say or how many articles you read or whatever you may think, it HAPPENED! So get it in your small brains and digest it!

 
So our actual experience from using our raided systems every day is outweighed just by what you theorize? yeah whatever...  
 

 
I agree with darkguset.  I speak from experience because my system has two 150gb raptors raid 0. I've also used it with only one raptor. I KNOW the difference.
 
mkaibear even if you don't like the fact, raid 0 is noticeably faster than 1 drive even on the desktop. Maybe not necessarily for loading game levels, but for a whole lot of other tasks. I don't care what your theories say.
 
You talk about links, well here's one:
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_co [...] aid&page=5
It shows 2 raptors in raid 0 have significant  performance advantage over a single raptor in all but seek time, and 8.1ms to 8.3ms is hardly significant.
 
E.g. from their figures 1 GB write speed test: 1 Drive: 46Mb/s 2 Drives 76 Mb/s
 
So if you do the math: To write a 1gb file takes 22 seconds single drive, 13 seconds on raid 0.  
 
If you think thats not noticeable at all then I guess in your desktop world you don't ever copy isos around or anything.

 
Mate, what you are saying comes to the limits of ridiculousness. You are stating that you don't believe what you are experiencing because theory tells something else! That specific game behaved in that way on my specific system. It took the loading times almost 3 times down. Now regarding windows boot times as others mentioned, it only took them maybe 2 seconds down, no more. Why RAID affected that game so much, i don't know, i didn't investigate, but one thing is for sure. It happened and whatever you say or how many articles you read or whatever you may think, it HAPPENED! So get it in your small brains and digest it!
 
the problem there, is it may have 'seemed' 3 times faster... but its 'physically impossible' for that to even be so, just from raiding 2 identical drives together... perhaps maybe the game had already been cached into your systems ram, after an initial load... having things stored in ram would definetly improve loading times honestly... ...but performance of a hdd will not triple, when youre only 'at best' doubling its potential performance from an additional hdd.
 
for performance to triple, assuming perfomance is scaling perfectly linearly... you would need 3 identical hdds, and enough bandwidth available to do so... same with 4 drives, 5 drives, and so on.
 
as far as boot times though... its dependant on much more than hdd performance... with an iRAM drive for instance, which is much faster than any standard drive... windows didnt boot instantaneously by any means... it still has to recognize and load drivers for hardware and such first too... alot more than just some software files... the less you have installed in your system however, the faster windows will boot... ...which is why a fresh installation of windows, right after an install, will typically boot faster, because theres no hardware to load really.

wait... if Raid 0 has improvements, then which one improves better?  Raid 0 or 1?  (compare to JBOD)
 
(so we are working on a level playing field of perhaps say same number of drives)

well... raid 0 and raid 1 have two distinctly different purposes...
 
with raid 1, youll be getting similar performance to a single hdd, but you have redundancy though too, incase a drive happens to go down
 
with raid 0, the aim is to simply improve performance, but there is no redundancy at all included... so more danger losing data then