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Will raid 0 double my performance?

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I was thinking of buying 2 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... and raid 0. I just want to know if raid 0 will double my read/write performance. If not about how much faster if it is in raid 0. Is it worth it to raid 0 for pure gaming?

Also:
If it is recommended to raid 0 for gaming should I raid 0 these drives or the http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

is there a major difference in 16MB cache and 32MB cache?

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It will almost double read/write if set up properly and it is not worth it for gaming. Well, unless you have a skulltrail motherboard - nothing should prevent you from wasting more money for more marginal gains then.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/17/parallel_process...

article tom did a late last year. Basically Raid will not make huge improvements for games. I've run Single HD setup and various raid setups. In most games there is almost no visable boost in performance. Now if you are doing server stuff or work with giant multimedia files for example raids may help you but in all honesty if you are a gamer you a better off saving your cash and just getting a good HD with descent access times and 32 meg SATAII interface. Going from Sata 8 Megs to 16 meg to 32 meg cache hard drives I did notice better load times in games...but not so much from running raids.
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Gaming Expert

There is generally no real world(vs. synthetic transfer rate benchmarks) performance advantage to raid of any kind.
Go to www.storagereview.com at this link: http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=Single...
There are some specific applications that will benefit, but
gaming is not one of them. Even if you have an application which reads one input file sequentially, and writes
it out, you will perform about as well by putting the input on one drive, and the output on the other.

Hi,
I had a raid0 of raptors.
In games, it's absolutely unuseful. A good recent 7200rpm sata drive (like seagate 7200.11 or samsung f1) will do the same.
I had a little improvement in games by using scsi drives (with a good controller), but it clearly doesn't worth the price.
The only way to greatly improve storage performance is using a ssd like mtron... if you can afford it...
Storage Expert

Posted this on a another thread a while back

nukemaster said:
What will raid0 not help?

-Frame Rates - Once a game is in ram(loaded) there is not much more use of the hard drive
-Load time on games that use heavily compressed files(in most cases the cpu becomes the bottleneck of not being able to decompress as fast as the hard drive can feed it)
-MP3's do not sound better on raid :) 

What it will help

+Game loads for games that do not use files that are heavily compressed(light compressed games and maps will load faster as long as the cpu can keep up with the drive. Most FPS will load quicker, not play quicker tho).
+It may reduce(but not eliminate) lag spikes if a game has to load data on the fly(Games that have no load screens and load as you walk, mostly MMO's)
+Writing and reading uncompressed large video and audio(Multichannel) files.
+Loading windows(But not by much)

So the real question is. What do you want it for? If its just games, you may get loaded quicker but it will not give you faster frames. If you work with allot of multimedia then raid0 is not a bad idea.

I you have a spare drive(External works well for this) for back-up all the "Risk" of raid0 is not a problem. In that case. give er

I have raid0 with no regrets :) 


The point being raid0 will help somethings(and is not a waste of money if you can take advantage of it), with hard drives as cheap as they are its not a bad option, just dont expect it to increase FPS(if you want that better get another video card and SLI/Corssfire, but even thats not always gonna work with some games)....it it does not cut load times in half...but if you do any large file work its worth it....a slight load time increase in games is just a side effect.....

Like everyone else says its only good in certain applications. I have 2 raid0 arrays and i spend a lot of time moving and extracting large files (7-50gb) and I can see huge gains when moving and extracting between the 2 arrays. Outside of that function I dont really notice any difference.. Any time I copy from my main drive to the raid arrays its still limited by the1 drive Im copying from.

Basically RAID 0 doubles your write speed on HUGE file transfers. Like database applications, mailbox servers, file servers, backup storage that pushes to tape... etc.

For random I/O, which is what most games will be, there is absolutely no performance gain. Consequently reads are not faster, but reads are faster off of a RAID 1 setup.

No.

Never do RAID 0 unless you want to lose all your data at any time without notice.

Go RAID 5 if you feel there are a lot of read/writes (databases).

Games do not benefit from fast read writes since it stores the information into RAM. If you are getting a lot of read/writes then you should buy more RAM.

ragingazn628 said:
I was thinking of buying 2 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... and raid 0. I just want to know if raid 0 will double my read/write performance. If not about how much faster if it is in raid 0. Is it worth it to raid 0 for pure gaming?

Also:
If it is recommended to raid 0 for gaming should I raid 0 these drives or the http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

is there a major difference in 16MB cache and 32MB cache?

Shadow703793 said:
^Agreed. RAID 0 will help greatly if you are doing video editing, encoding,etc. It has minimal impact on gaming.


you should do RAID 5 then not RAID 0.

Putting your drives in RAID 0 is similar to putting a bomb on your harddrive without knowing when it'll go off.

xxsk8er101xx, That's just a little bit exaggerated don't you think? RAID 0 only reduces the reliability of your disk because you essentially have a single point of failure that can happen in 2 places. This obviously is the worst RAID config since if your going to spend the money to RAID, you may as well make your disks redundant. But to say that it's a bomb waiting to go off (data loss wise) is just a bit on the left wing side of things.
Storage Expert

xxsk8er101xx said:
you should do RAID 5 then not RAID 0.

Putting your drives in RAID 0 is similar to putting a bomb on your harddrive without knowing when it'll go off.

So is a single drive(it goes so does your data anyway)..Should everyone ALWAYS run raid5?
Thats what back-up is for...

Well the theory is that a RAID 0 statistically cuts the life of your "drive" in half because you now have 2 disks with the chance to fail and you will lose all data on both disks.
Gaming Expert

To the OP, what does your gaming machine look like? As mentioned, AID0 will only reduce load times for your games or levels. It will NOT increase your FPS at all. If your system is already has high end as it gets, perhaps now is the time for you to install an AID0 array on your computer. If however you can install a faster CPU/GPU, or more memory, or a lager monitor, etc, then you should do that.

Quote:
you essentially have a single point of failure that can happen in 2 places.


Not true. You have 3 possible failure points. One for each drive, plus the driver. If your RAID driver gets corrupted, then you need to format and start over.
Storage Expert

well i still have 2 120 gig drives from back when the athlon64 came(2004) out and they have spent a lifetime in (R)aid0(I like how 4745454b takes out the R since there is no redundancy on 0) without problems.

As said. its only good when you need LOTS of bandwidth. all my files are on single drives and have regular backups. The raid setup holds windows and games and any video files i am working on....
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