Archived from groups: alt.sys.pc-clone.dell (More info?)
For anybody considering setting up a RAID 0 stripe on their computers
for more performance, I thought that I would share my experiences with
you before you make the plunge.
I have a Dimension 8400 with an onboard RAID controller on the
motherboard. I got a hold of a free 160GB Maxtor SATA drive which is
the same size as my Seagate 160GB SATA drive that my 8400 came with. I
did some testing of real world performance between a single drive and
the 2 drives together in a RAID 0 configuration.
Overall, for general purpose stuff...booting, playing Battlefield 2,
running Office applications and such.....using the RAID 0 configuation
provides no improvement in performance. All tests were within 1 second
of each other and sometimes the RAID config was even slower. Of course,
the benchmarks apps showed a huge performane increase ( I went from
52MB/s to 94MB/s), but actual performance for me was unnoticeable.
Where I did see a huge increase in performance was reading and writing
very large files from one folder on the drive to another folder on the
drive. It would also make a large difference if you were heavy into
graphic editing, movie editing or high end photoshop stuff.
Overall, I went back to a single drive. The risks with RAID 0 (if you
lose 1 drive, you lose all of the data) isn't worth the miniscule
performance increase (or decrease in some cases) for what I typically do
with my computers. I occassionally copy large files around, but not
enough to risk the loss of data in the event of a drive failure.
So there you have it, from a real world computer user who througly
tested and timed. Even if you are a hardcore gamer, your bottlenecks
are not with the disk drive and stipeing your hard drive for performance
reasons is getting you no advantage.
I'm sure somebody will strongly disagree with me, but like I said...for
the types of things that I do with my system, RAID0 provided no
benefits. Now, I do use RAID 1 (mirror) for my file server where data
redundancy is the number 1 thing.......so don't get he wrong idea, I
appreicate the benefits of RAID. There just wasn't any benefit of me
running RAID0. My performance in battlefield 2 did NOT change.
For anybody considering setting up a RAID 0 stripe on their computers
for more performance, I thought that I would share my experiences with
you before you make the plunge.
I have a Dimension 8400 with an onboard RAID controller on the
motherboard. I got a hold of a free 160GB Maxtor SATA drive which is
the same size as my Seagate 160GB SATA drive that my 8400 came with. I
did some testing of real world performance between a single drive and
the 2 drives together in a RAID 0 configuration.
Overall, for general purpose stuff...booting, playing Battlefield 2,
running Office applications and such.....using the RAID 0 configuation
provides no improvement in performance. All tests were within 1 second
of each other and sometimes the RAID config was even slower. Of course,
the benchmarks apps showed a huge performane increase ( I went from
52MB/s to 94MB/s), but actual performance for me was unnoticeable.
Where I did see a huge increase in performance was reading and writing
very large files from one folder on the drive to another folder on the
drive. It would also make a large difference if you were heavy into
graphic editing, movie editing or high end photoshop stuff.
Overall, I went back to a single drive. The risks with RAID 0 (if you
lose 1 drive, you lose all of the data) isn't worth the miniscule
performance increase (or decrease in some cases) for what I typically do
with my computers. I occassionally copy large files around, but not
enough to risk the loss of data in the event of a drive failure.
So there you have it, from a real world computer user who througly
tested and timed. Even if you are a hardcore gamer, your bottlenecks
are not with the disk drive and stipeing your hard drive for performance
reasons is getting you no advantage.
I'm sure somebody will strongly disagree with me, but like I said...for
the types of things that I do with my system, RAID0 provided no
benefits. Now, I do use RAID 1 (mirror) for my file server where data
redundancy is the number 1 thing.......so don't get he wrong idea, I
appreicate the benefits of RAID. There just wasn't any benefit of me
running RAID0. My performance in battlefield 2 did NOT change.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram