ranspilot :
I have a 1 TB drive that dual boots to XP pro and Win 7 RTM. My system is just a couple of months old. I just bought 2 150 gig Raptors and I want to add a RAID 0 array to the mix. I want to use the RAID drive for gaming only and not for the OSs. Is it possible to do this, or would it be better to do a clean install and go with one OS or the other. I do not really want to put the OS and games on the RAID 0 drive, but will if this is the better way to go. Thanks for any help!
Just a few thoughts for you:
1) With windows-7 availability imminent, I would make plans to install it. If you are a student, you can get it really cheap. It will be better and simpler. Select RAID in the bios before install instead of IDE which is often the default. RAID is a superset of AHCI so you will be set up for any configuration. The only reason to not select RAID is if you know you will never use it, and you will avoid the bios initialization of raid code at boot time. In that case select AHCI.
2) It is not clear to me what game usage the raid-0 raptors will serve if you do not install games on them. If you use them to save games, using a single drive is probably better.
3) 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=SingleDriveVsRaid0
There are some specific applications that will benefit, but
gaming is not one of them.
4) The raptor or the 1tb drive will perform about the same as an OS drive. For a meaningful difference in performance, consider a good SSD as the OS drive.
5) The raptors at 10k rpm give fast access, but ordinary data transfer speeds. The velociraptor might seem to be similar but will actually give better data transfer speeds because it is much denser, and transfers more data per revolution. A good 1tb drive will do the same using only part of the drive at lower cost.
6) Go to www.storagereview.com and access their performance database. Look at the benchmarks that are representative of your usage. In particular, look at the maximum data transfer tests. It will give you a good indication of the performance capabilities of different drives.