WD360 in Raid 0 for gaming

[uLTRANYTE]

Hi,

I'm currently making a custom system. In short best of the best part will only go in.(pentium, not AMD; 3 or 4 GB RAM)
Being a hardcore gamer, I willing to blow what it takes to make the best. (Gotta be ready for Half Life 2!!! wooooo it's gonna blow everything away)

the question is this: which motherboard would be best to have two WD360 in Raid+0 for maximum performance in games!! not just fast file performance

Also, if I can I'm looking into making a 4x WD360 Raid+0. I've heard of only one new motherboard that supports four hard drives in raid +0. But now I can't find it anymore, it was somewhere on Tom's site.


Thanks, I look forward to your help

 

[Strife]

Even with 512 MB of Ram hard drive performance will have no effect on game performance. Once the game loads it is running exclusively from your memory. The game may load a tiny bit faster, but it seems to be that most of the time is spent initializing direct X and the games graphic engine and not copying files from the hard drive.

RAID will boost performance with audio and vido editing such as converting movies from DVD to DivX.

I am part of a clan that plays online games and I think the most important factor for PC games is regular backups. Nothing is more frustrating that to not be able to play for favorite game when you want because Windows is acting weird. Thats the biggest advantage consoles have over PC gamming. The console never makes spend two hours reinstalling your OS to fix something.

I keep a 20 GB partion on my first drive which I only use for installing applications. Then I keep all my other files and folders on partion, email, desktop, my document etc. Each week I use Norton Ghost to backup my OS partion.

If (or rather when) something goes wrong, it takes me 7 mins from shutdown to start up to bring my OS back to working conditon.

Learing how to backup your OS and having a sound backup strategy will add more to your gamming experience that any hardware.

 

[uLTRANYTE]

Right Right
Sorry I should of said that differently. I'm getting as much RAM as I can so the games run completely from RAM. But problem is some games refer to the hard drive even when theres 4x the RAM it needs to run (just poopy programming in some) So I want to cover that with Maximum performance

also, Making maps and such needs fast hard drive access. I've tried rendering big big maps before took days with my previous computer.

 

[sjonnie]

I'm looking into making a 4x WD360 Raid+0

I think you're being a little over zealous. How much disk throughput do you expect to get? How much do you think you actually need? A single raptor has an average read time of 50MBps. Put two in a RAID0 and you will have already saturated a standard 33MHz 32bit PCI bus. If you want to use 4 in RAID0 you might expect maximum 200MBps read. That is pretty ridiculous, what files do you need to load at that rate? Anyway, if that's what you want you will need a 66MHz PCI bus slot and a RocketRaid404 or similar. Trouble is, you're not going to find a Canterwood board with 66MHz PCI. Just get the MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R and put 2 raptors on the serial RAID. Incidentally, you'll never fit 4Gb of RAM in such a motherboard seeing as there are no manufactureres of 1GB DDR400 RAM sticks.

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