Looking to gain speed on XP which RAID should I use?? And How do I it? Ive been reading and it seems the best type of array is 0 because i dont care much for security. Maybe im wrong... what do u guys think? I game alot will this also help my performance there too? Also what is the best way of doing this??? Is there an easy way to do this??

There're many ways to gain speed in XP. I'll talk about software first.

Diskeeper 2007 Pro premier:
Automatic defragmentation, I-FAAST, Frag shield.

Change your pagefile directory to another physical disk, make sure you set the size yourself. It should preferably be around 1.5 times of your ram capacity.

Hardware:
I see your motherboard's a crosshair. You should be able to run a raid setup on it.
Raid 0 divides your redundancy into half. So unless you have img backups or don't have any important files on your OS disk, i won't recommend using raid 0.
If you have a little more money, you can get a specialised raid controller.
http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata2-9650.asp
and run raid 5. The cost/capacity ratio, speed and redundancy are all there. If you have more to splurge on harddrives, run a raid 1+0 or 0+1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

People are always badmouthing RAID0

2x 160gb/250gb drives in RAID0 with the smallest stripe size possible SEEMS to be the best one to go for to me.

For some reason you also my want to lock out about 30 - 40% of your hrddrive so you cant use it. This will stop data getting put into the inner bit of the harddrive disk, which will greatly lower performance.

Don't bother with Raid 0.
The only noticeable difference you'll see is in benchmarking and that's about it.
I was at Raid 0 and saw no gains whatsoever in gaming and or any normal everyday tasks so went back to just the one drive. Better off using the 2nd one for storage.

raid 0 has been great to me, i get the performnce for 2x 150gb raptors, in raid, i get 2tb of storage and it cost me a bit less, why not? i think since the author has considered raid 0 as an option he/she is aware of the risks, and the way i see it, when one harddrive dies and it isn't in raid you loose data and need to replace the drive, so the same still applies to raid 0...

I too noticed a difference between a single disk and RAID-0. I really notice a difference in game-loading, virus-scan, defragmenting, and anything else that will use the disks for anything longer than just a few seconds. I RAIDed two WD Enterprise disks and have a 320GB backup...my *** is covered ^.^

I am another satisfied RAID 0 user, i have 2x 320 GB Western Digital RE2 enterprise drives and they are working great and much faster than a single drive.

I also keep my important stuff on another drive.

Aslong as you keep the HD's quite cool with some fans they shouldnt just pack up anyway... Antec900 covers that pretty well. 1x 120mm fan for each hard drive!!

I only keep games and stuff on my computer nothing like Photos or anything important. Games can just be re-installed. No problem to me.

Anyone know any programs that will do this for me??

@arima - Windows already sets your upper cap on the page file to 1.5 times your RAM. It automatically selects the ideal size. Also, RAID0 does not halve redundancy compared to a single drive because a single drive has no redundancy to begin with - what it does is increase the risk of failure.

@hatman - In terms of performance, you would actually want your data on the inner-most cylinders closest to the spindle. By ignoring the outer cylinders when reading/writing data you actually decrease latency and seek times.

@rammedstein - Don't forget that data is striped in a RAID0. If a drive fails in a RAID0, then all data is lost in the array since data is split between drives. E.G. if you have a large movie file, then parts of it will be stored on each drive. One of the drive fails, and you only have parts of the movie on the good drive. You've effectively lost that data as well. However, in a single drive setup, a drive failure may only mean part of the drive is damaged. The sectors that contain your movie file may still be in good shape and can be recovered in their entirety. That is why we say there is higher risk in a RAID0, your individual files now have multiple points of failure (if you consider each drive as a single point of failure; in reality, a single drive can be subdivided further into separate points of failure...)

RAID 0 kicks ***!! I have it on all of my desktops and will never go back. I actually had both of my drives die all of a sudden but all was cool because I had several images to back up from. I sent the drives in on warranty and put the image back on the new drives and kept on truck'in.
RAID 0 is NOT HARD to set up in your BIOS man. Just go in there and enable RAID for the channels you need. If you're not sure just check in your manual for your board as to how the channels are numbered on your SATA controller. If there is an option to enable RAID BIOS then enable that too. Usually this stuff is found in advanced mother board options or something similar sounding. Then save those changes of course and when your compy reboots you need to watch for which key to press to get into your RAID BIOS. From here its usually just a matter of choosing which disks you want to RAID,type of RAID, and stripe size if doing 0. Don't forget to make the array bootable before you save and exit. Thats about it man. I highly recommend that you have disks that are matched and already formatted and ready to go.

Enjoy that RAID 0 man....I know I notice a difference and I only have twin 80's in all of my rigs. I am always the first one loaded in CSS because of it and my rig is a couple of years old now. They're all sustaining 95MB/sec throughput....if I had faster drives like twin 500's or something... whoa hang on!!!

Programs? I am assuming you are asking what you need to build a RAID array.
You don't use a program. (Well you can build software RAID from within Windows, but there is no advantage at all to doing this, software RAID will actually slow you system down, and is not true RAID)
Your motherboard handles RAID with hardware via the onboard RAID controller, or you can buy an add-in card with a RAID controller to attach your drives to. I think your board does have a built in RAID controller already, so you have everything you need to build a RAID array already except a matching set of drives.

RAID 0 is setup by having 2 identical drives(doesn't have to be, but to get the most out of it, 2 identical drives is a must)
Quickly and simply.....
You hook them up to your motherboard's controller that support's RAID.
Go into the BIOS and enable RAID support, then you will have access during POST to go into the RAID BIOS (which is seperate than the regular BIOS) configuration and configure the 2 drives as a striped set. 2 -100 meg drives in RAID 0 will net you 1 drive of 200 meg. When you load Windows, it will see the 2 drives as 1 large drive. The advantage is that information or data is split in half equally across 2 drives by the controller. So you have 2 drives on 2 channels reading and writing 50% each of the information flowing, allowing for faster overall throughput. The disadvantage is obvious. If a drive or a controller fails, you lose everything, and recovery from a failed RAID 0 array is nearly impossible.

I have used RAID 0, and it does make some improvement. Booting is a little faster, game loading times are a little faster, and transfering large files is a lot faster. That is what RAID 0 will do for you.
I will say that RAID 0 is probably a last upgrade one would think of to squeeze the very most out of an already fast system.

Either way, do some Googleing and read up on RAID. From your questions, you should enlist the help of friend, or do more research. RAID can be a little tricky to set-up without a good understanding of what you are doing. But like everything else, once you do it 1 time, and get it right, it's really not hard to do.

I'm another in favor on RAID 0. I use it as my main drive (OS and games). I also have a RAID 1 array for all my important data (I would recommend you implement some sort of redundancy for your system). Don't let nay-sayers keep you from trying it. As is the general consensus, know the risk, and plan accordingly.

Enjoy!

Have a read of this and see if it's worthwhile for you.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/s [...] i=2101&p=1



I know some ppl say games load faster but in BF2 i found that with Raid 0 and non_Raid I was getting into the game first anyway and had about 20 secs at least on everyone else. Raid 0 maybe made a difference of about 2-3 secs but that doesn't justify it.

Airblazer is right, don't bother with raid. The link is old, but still valid. I think qwertycopter(nice name) is wrong about the speed of inner/outer cylinders. The disk rotates with only one speed for the inner and outer cylinders; therefore the latency is the same for all accesses. The circumference of the outer rings is longer, and can hold more data. This means that more data can be read in one rotation from the outer rings than the inner, resulting in a higher data rate. Also, more data will reside under the read/write head at any one time on the outer cylinders, resulting in fewer arm repositioning(seeks) to read that data. This disparity causes a flaw in all of the single drive vs. raid-0 benchmarks that I have seen. The raid-0 tests will be using two drives vs. one, resulting in having more of the fast data on the outer cylinders of the raid-0 configuration. They do not test the alternative of splitting half the data on to a second drive which is what you would do if you had a second one available for raid.
If you want better hard drive performance, use the 150gb raptor for any data that needs speed. If you need more capacity than 150gb, then add a second slower drive that costs less per gb.