New System will I benefit from Raid?

novast

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I am building a new system. I want this one to be pretty high end and was wondering if I would benefit greatly from adding a second HDD and setting it up as Raid? Also can I initially build the system without Raid and add/configure a second HDD later?

Here are the components. The plan is to buy another IDential HDD. This is a gaming Desktop.

1 CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible with
.
1 EVGA 012-P3-1470-AR GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support

1 ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO AM3 AMD 785G HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard

1 G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-

1 AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor HDZ965FBGMBOX

1 SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive


1 Antec Nine Hundred Two Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case


 

novast

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Jul 11, 2010
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This is a new OS build from scratch. My question was does Raid increase performance significantly? And is it worth it?
 
There is generally no real world(vs. synthetic transfer rate benchmarks) performance advantage to raid of any kind using motherboard raid. I saw no benefit when I tried it some years ago; not worth it to me.
There are some specific applications that will benefit, but
gaming is not one of them. Even if you have an application which reads one input file sequentially, and writes
it out, you will perform about as well by putting the input on one drive, and the output on the other.

For best performance get a SSD for the OS and a separate large storage drive.

6 core cpu's or even 4 core cpu's do not improve performance unless your application or game are multi core enabled. It is better to get a fast dual core cpu if that is the case.

I like the tower type heat sinks with a large, slow turning 120mm fan. Most any will do. You should be able to find one for <$40.

For gaming, the graphics card is usually much more important than the cpu.
 
RAID 0 would increase performance by 1.5X roughly (mine did).

I've seen benchmarks on that Samsung drive, and they were close to my 2xSeagate 7200.11 500GB RAID 0 array.

But, still a far cry from a SSD, and no HDD comes close to the SATA II bandwidth, as SSD do. My HDD array peaks at 150MBps, half of a single SATA II specs.

And yes, you'll have to reinstall Windows if you add a RAID 0 array later.

Some would say it's worth it, some will swear never do it, claiming drive failure. Just back up frequently. But most will say get an SSD for OS and PRograms, and a large fast HDD for data/media, like the Samsung Spinpoint. I say get a single SSD. Intel X25-M 80GB.

As for a CPU Cooler, Scythe Mugen2 RevB. Universal CPU Cooler.
 


True, synthetic benchmarks of raid-0 are impressive, but they do best measuring sequential transfer rates of large files. Something I rarely did in the real world. With conventional hard drives, I hardly noticed any difference. I did try raid-0 of two small SSD's to get a larger system image, and that worked out well.