Speed up my storage device?

[pota100]

Ok, I know that SSD is way faster, but it cost alot. So i heard that RAID is the best solution. I've searched a little bit but I'm not pretty sure what would fit the best with what I want.

So, basically, I don't know that if I'm right but i heard that I could speed up my gaming performance by speeding up my hard drive set up. Is it right? If yes which set up is the best. I know that RAID 0 is the best for performance and RAID 1 is best for safety. But it seems that everone are going crazy about RAID 0 because it's not safe. Is that really unsafe? So that's why I looked at further RAID. That's how I found raid 5. Is it appropriate for what I want to do? Because I'm gaming alot, I have alot of music and I'm planning on getting a mini guitar studio so I want all those future project to be safe.

What you all think of this?

If it's what I need to do, do anyone can explain me how can I set up this ( from A to Z ) on my computer or can tell me a good website that explain it WELL.

Thanks

 

[sminlal]

a) Most games load into RAM and then run from there. If you have enough RAM, making your hard drive faster generally won't speed up anything more than the initial loading of the game. But there may be some exceptions if a particular game needs to do some intensive disk activity during game play - for example loading new scenes when you move between sections of the game.

b) RAID can speed up transfer rates but not access times. That means it can help most for tasks that require reading a few large files, but not so much for reading lots of small files. So it may or may not help depending on the access patterns of the programs you use.

c) RAID 0 really is less safe. When your only copy of your data is interleaved across two drives, you have twice as much chance of loosing it as if it was on a single drive. But even though other RAID organizations such as RAID 1 protect you from disk failure, they don't do anything to protect your files from accidental deletion, corruption, theft of your computer system, hardware damage due to power hits, disasters, etc. The only way to make sure your data is really safe is to do backups to external drives and, ideally, store at least one copy offsite. If you do that then RAID 0 is more likely to cause you the inconvenience of having to restore your data, but it won't be any less safe overall.

d) RAID 5 is safer than RAID 0, but it has much worse write performance. Generally speaking RAID 5 is not something you'd choose when you're looking for the best performance.

 

[pota100]

Thanks for the PRECISE answer

Well, I guess I will wait a bit and stay with my actual hard drive. Maybe I will change it later. I guess these "RAID" system is more for specifics extreme things or even server. I guess it's not for me

Thanks

P.S. : If I'm not right, I hope you can tell me what should be the best

 

[Paperdoc]

sminlal is right on all points. RAID0 offers very little speedup in gaming performance versus today's fast SATA drives, and it does have less reliability that a single drive. But for ANY HDD storage system, the only really safe process is regular backups to removable units.

 

[pota100]

Best answer selected by pota100.