Hard Drive Bottleneck? Your RAID advise please.

[J_Sparrow]

HI,
So I`ve successfully over-clocked me CPU. Me system be fast, but I figure th' slowest part now be access t' an' from hard drives.

I`ve heard o' RAID, an' me limited understandin' be that RAID 0 uses 2 identical drives (say 1TB) an' writes one bit o' information t' one an' th' next bit o' info t' th' other, so 2 hard drives act like one drive. th' size o' both drives only shows as 1TB still but 'tis much quicker?

Now if i sailed' an' bought 2 x http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitachi-De [...] 638&sr=8-2 ... an' RAID 0 them, then will I notice a big difference if i put me OS on them an' th' main programs I use. Will this make a significant speed increase in Windows bootin' up an' things like unzippin' or PARin' files?

Be thar a specific type o' hard drive i ortin' ta use?

Does th' buffer size o' th' hard drive make much difference?

Be th' speed gain double?

Why would ere use an expensive Raptor drive (10,000rpm) if I can get a drive wi' a 32MB buffer (7200rpm) that might run nearly as fast?

Do i need t' use a special cable t' join them together?

Do i need special software?

Be 't done through th' BIOS, if so 't it fairly straght fore?

Thank you
Ya scurvy dog!

 

[roosti3]

Alrighty Jack,

How much are you looking to spend on your two drives?

I went to raid 5 with sataII80 GB drives for my OS and APPS and honestly dont really seem much improvment.

In a quick easy to understand summary.....

raid 0 is for speed - writes to both HDs alternatively - 2 x 1TB drives would give 2 TB storage
raid 1 is for data security - backs up drive 1 on drive 2 - 2 x 1TB gives 1 TB storage
raid 5 is a bit of both - I have 3 drives installed. 2 to give raid 0 and one extra to get data recovery on a drive failure. so 3 x 1TB drives would give 2 TB storage.

Raid needs to be supported by motherboard (or a pci card I suppose). No fancy cables. Need drivers which are normally on the motherboard disk to be installed via floppy or usb during install. Think you would need a fresh windows install and raid setup before installing windows.

In summary would recommend buying a small SSD for you OS and a larger normal drive for your data. Although I haven't tried it it will be my next step. Should be much faster, cooler, quieter.

 

[Salt-City_Slasher]

U spent a lot of time adding your accent into your question, or do you just type with an accent?

 

[RJR]

or do you just type with an accent?

:lol: