RAID 0 worth it?

[enforcerviper]

I bought the intel bundle and I'm wondering if I should buy either:

2x160GB 8MB SATAII 7200 drives OR
1x320GB Seagate 16MB SATAII NCQ 7200 drive...


What will give better performance??

[Daijoubu]

2x160 may give faster reads but also double the failure rate

Either drive fail, kiss good bye to your data

[Icedawn]

as a past math major, I feel a moral obligation to point out the small problem with what you say. =)

Assuming the failure rate is X, the new failure rate of a raid 0 is 1-(1-x)(1-x) = 1 - (1-2x + x^2) = x^2+2x.

For example, if the old rate was 1/2... the new rate is now 3/4.

But yes, in general, I agree... I've done the raid 0 thing.. unless you're constantly backing up, either by doing raid 10/01 or nightly backups.... its not necessarily worth it.

[Daijoubu]

Ok well I exagerated a bit :D
Just to say RAID0 ain't no RAID, which means redundant array of independent disks

In mode 0, there's nothing about redundency, just a stupid stripped array

[enforcerviper]

I could care less about the data on it. It will be a media center/gaming pc. Any important data will be storaged on my storage server instead.

Risk of data is basically none.

My question is.. 2x8mb cache drives or 1x 16mb cache? Also the 16mb drive has NCQ.

Which is faster? I'm going for pure speed when loading OS and games.

[ShadowVlican]

in that case.... go for RAID0 setup

but you might benefit more from a raptor with it's low latency, even though its throughput isn't as high as ur RAID0 choices

[Nubee]

I'm for raid 0. Although a lot of people ( even review sites )says it's no better or only a bit better than a single drive, I could tell my os/apps/games loads faster and that is the purpose of raid 0.

[Daijoubu]

I could care less about the data on it. It will be a media center/gaming pc. Any important data will be storaged on my storage server instead.

Risk of data is basically none.

My question is.. 2x8mb cache drives or 1x 16mb cache? Also the 16mb drive has NCQ.

Which is faster? I'm going for pure speed when loading OS and games.

NCQ is only useful in a IO intensive environment (ie: db server)

[Cafe_333]

I'm for raid 0. Although a lot of people ( even review sites )says it's no better or only a bit better than a single drive, I could tell my os/apps/games loads faster and that is the purpose of raid 0.I agree, Raid-0 all the way if you offload permanent files to a file server. I'm not sure what review sites say that, but benchmarks show literally 2x the read and write times, so you will see definate improvements in loading games.

[matkun]

I'd say spend the little bit extra, and get two 7200.10 Barracuda 320GB drives..

It's only $200 roughly, and I have two of those in a Raid 0 setup. Windows load up speed is definitely noticeably faster then with a single drive, and EQ2 loading times while zoning are 80% or so of what they were before.

The 160GB ones are also a slightly older technology (7200.9 I'm guessing, do not have the perpendicular recording feature).

But then again, even I'm wondering what I'm going to do with 640 GBs of storage.

My HDTach tests were getting roughly 74 MB/s transfer speeds on single, and ~130 on Raid 0. Access times went up by 0.5 ms or so though.

[Amourek]

I tried RAID-0 recently with two 16MB cache SATA drives. Zero difference I could benchmark except for synthetics.

[matkun]

I tried RAID-0 recently with two 16MB cache SATA drives. Zero difference I could benchmark except for synthetics.

It mostly doesn't show up except for loading times.. Since EQ2 is pretty load intensive with so many textures and other information, the Raid 0 helps there. I used to be the 2nd/3rd person to load into a zone in our regular group. Now I'm the 1st, so it's definitely making a difference, though it's only maybe 4 or so seconds, on a load time of 20-40.