HDD config for gaming RAID 10?

Dear all,

Looking for a quick answer on this one!

I’m buliding a new gaming PC and was wondering what HDD configs I should choose.

The pc is going to run all high-end GFX games and some multimedia apps like Adobe Photoshop CSx and Office Tools like MS Office 2007.

The OS is going to be Vista Ultimate x64 SP1.

I’ve bought 4x Samsung SP F1, 500GB, SATAII, 16MB, and I’m thinking of a RAID 10 (I’ve got a nForce i690 MOBO) – all other hardware parts are in place (RAM, GPU, CPU). I’m thining the RAID 10 for speed (striping (0)) and backup (raid (1)).

Primary gaming, secondary multimedia.a

Thanks in advance,
UG

I can't seem to edit my post?

I have a ASUS Striker II 780i nFoce chipset, and not a i690. sorry

UG

lots of people will tell you that you don't need raid for performance. I'm one of them, although if I had 2 TB drives sitting around I'd be tempted to raid 0. Remember that adding drives means adding access time.

Raid is for redundancy, not performance. But I wouldn;t do a raid 10, at least not with the big drives.

Heya,

RAID is great so if you have all these disks, use them. I would not use RAID10 though. For gaming, you do NOT need mirroring. That's a really big waste of the time for that. Mirroring is really redundant, it's just multiple copies of the same stuff and you only get 1/2 the storage capacity of the total array. If this is gaming and some stuff on the side, why mirror it? The worst if it failed would be to reinstall some games.

Instead, go with RAID5. It'll give you the speed of a 0 array strip, but with 5 you get some parity across all the drives on the array (3 minimum drives, which you have covered since you have 4+). This gives you security because if a single drive fails, the array is not broken and you can literally swap it out without turning anything off nor any downtime, replace, it rebuilds parity and you keep going. RAID5 is great for that and probably more what a gaming machine like you're talking about would use.

Cheers,