bubbatran209

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I'm new at the raid 0. I am currently running win7 ultimate 64 on my 500gb harddrive. I was thinking about buying 2 80gb hd to set those up as raid 0. How would I set things up from there? Do I just install the two 80gb into sata 0 and 1, then the 500gb to sata 2? From there, I was thinking about going into the bios and setup the 2 80gb to raid 0 and put my os into it. Do I have to format my 500gb hd because it was originally my os? or can i just leave that alone? I was thinking not adding anyting into the two 80gb because I don't want my computer to slow down for having too many software running in the background. So just the OS and all the drives and programs to run computer on raid 0 and everything esle on the 500gb. Any ideas or suggestions? Thanks
 
What do you hope to gain by adding two what must be ancient by today's standards 80 GB drives ? Any modern 500 GB per platter drive will outperform them and while RAID 0 can provide advantages in specific applications, those applications are not found on 99 % of desktops.....gaming BTW is not one of them.
 

someguynamedmatt

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Honestly, I was just running an old 80gb drive from a Dell and a 2.5" notebook drive in RAID 0, and there was no performance boost at all from what I saw. Actually, the notebook drive alone outperformed the RAID 0 array for some reason.
Don't take this the wrong way... don't go out and get a notebook drive now... but you would be a whole lot better going out and spending $49.99 on a new hard drive instead of RAIDing a couple old ones.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148395&cm_re=seagate_barracuda_7200.12-_-22-148-395-_-Product

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152226&cm_re=samsung_f3-_-22-152-226-_-Product

From what I've seen and heard, those are both great drives. They'd both be faster than your RAID 0 array, and have quite a bit more storage capacity.
Just figured I'd point that out.
 

bubbatran209

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How about buying two of these and putting them in raid 0? Would it be a good idea?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136320

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148531&Tpk=ST315005N4A1AS-RK

Will I notice any different in my boot time and system performance? Right now it takes like from starting up my pc to when everything is up and loaded about two mins. I guess it could be that I have a few programs that needs to load up first. Especially that magic jack, that usually finishes last.
 
Boot time, yes.....system performance, no

While there are applications that do benefit from RAID 0, gaming isn't generally considered as one of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_0#RAID_0

RAID 0 is useful for setups such as large read-only NFS servers where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.

RAID 0 is also used in some gaming systems where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important. However, real-world tests with games have shown that RAID-0 performance gains are minimal, although some desktop applications will benefit.[1][2]


http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2101
"We were hoping to see some sort of performance increase in the game loading tests, but the RAID array didn't give us that. While the scores put the RAID-0 array slightly slower than the single drive Raptor II, you should also remember that these scores are timed by hand and thus, we're dealing within normal variations in the "benchmark".

Our Unreal Tournament 2004 test uses the full version of the game and leaves all settings on defaults. After launching the game, we select Instant Action from the menu, choose Assault mode and select the Robot Factory level. The stop watch timer is started right after the Play button is clicked, and stopped when the loading screen disappears. The test is repeated three times with the final score reported being an average of the three. In order to avoid the effects of caching, we reboot between runs. All times are reported in seconds; lower scores, obviously, being better. In Unreal Tournament, we're left with exactly no performance improvement, thanks to RAID-0

If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth."


http://www.techwarelabs.com/articl [...] ex_6.shtml
".....we did not see an increase in FPS through its use. Load times for levels and games was significantly reduced utilizing the Raid controller and array. As we stated we do not expect that the majority of gamers are willing to purchase greater than 4 drives and a controller for this kind of setup. While onboard Raid is an option available to many users you should be aware that using onboard Raid will mean the consumption of CPU time for this task and thus a reduction in performance that may actually lead to worse FPS. An add-on controller will always be the best option until they integrate discreet Raid controllers with their own memory into consumer level motherboards."

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1001325
"However, many have tried to justify/overlook those shortcomings by simply saying "It's faster." Anyone who does this is wrong, wasting their money, and buying into hype. Nothing more."

http://computer-drives-storage.sui [...] erformance
"The real-world performance benefits possible in a single-user PC situation is not a given for most people, because the benefits rely on multiple independent, simultaneous requests. One person running most desktop applications may not see a big payback in performance because they are not written to do asynchronous I/O to disks. Understanding this can help avoid disappointment."

http://www.scs-myung.com/v2/index. [...] om_content
"What about performance? This, we suspect, is the primary reason why so many users doggedly pursue the RAID 0 "holy grail." This inevitably leads to dissapointment by those that notice little or no performance gain.....As stated above, first person shooters rarely benefit from RAID 0.__ Frame rates will almost certainly not improve, as they are determined by your video card and processor above all else. In fact, theoretically your FPS frame rate may decrease, since many low-cost RAID controllers (anything made by Highpoint at the tiem of this writing, and most cards from Promise) implement RAID in software, so the process of splitting and combining data across your drives is done by your CPU, which could better be utilized by your game. That said, the CPU overhead of RAID0 is minimal on high-performance processors."

Even the HD manufacturers limit RAID's advantages to very specific applications and non of them involves gaming:

http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/