SATA RAID Performance

[Eroo]

I'm thinking about getting two sata hard drives to run in RAID 0 for better speed but I saw some sites state the performance difference is minimal. Any one running this can tell me for certain what the performance boost will be like.

[Beomagi]

Minimal. What are you using it for? straight copies? sure there's a difference. Buncha small files? none. Loading a game? almost none - couple no change in latency (may actually increase with poor raid controller) with cpu being necessary to rearange load data. Boot? almost none - even with a gigabyte i-ram It wont change much.

[TrinireturnofGamez]

 it will make a difference if you have a dual core system and want to do serious multi tasking.. you can't actually play a game , virus scan and compress a file without  a RAID, you will get spots of LAG as every program has  to share hard drive bandwidth .

[TriniXaeno]

which idiot will try to play a game, run a virus scan and compress a file at the same time?

I've never had a simultaneous burning need to purge my machine of unwanted code, zip up my movies folder and sweat Dark Crusade.

On a side note, I see the new version of AVG actually sets itself to run virus scans as low priority so it takes a little longer but does not hog your CPU and cause lags in games/apps.

Kinda cool because the machines at HQ are set to run virus scans early in the morning, when people aren't typically around but that can come back to haunt us during sweat. As gamers are there till the wee hours.

sweet.

[Netizen1]

I'd like to hear about someone's real life experience with RAID 0 or even RAID 1 (mirroring) at home, seeing as the technology has found it's way to John Public's home PC.


I wouldn't mind having a RAID 1 setup for my anime collection, but not if it'll hamper the systems general performance...

[W1nTry]

I've used RAID0 before and in my case there was a noticeable difference some of the time. I say, some as I am reffering to 1 thing in particular.  Back then I was moving around alot of video files from varying partitions on an ongoing basis so sure I saw some benefits. If you're somewhat narcisistic, it'll push your storage scores up in SiSandra :p I saw some small gains in loading times for select games (read doom3) and I didn't run into any problems until the mobo failed and I couldn't do squat with 2 striped drives until I got the RMA mobo back. It does help I won't lie, but you probably won't see much difference unless you're into video editing or storage on the fly from a tv capture card etc. As for RAID1, I have a friend that has thanked God many times over for having his machine in RAID1 since he keeps alot of important info on his machine and has had a few drives go belly up. Needless to say, with a mirror, it was easy to recover the 2nd drive and keep his data safe. It depends on your applications really.

[Prowl]

The speed increase from raid ( sata or not ) depends on the hardware/drives you use. Using built in raid may actually slow the machine down if the controller uses software level raid ( windows based ) using a dedicated raid contoller or hardware based raid even with raid 1 will speed things up. Hence my next add on is a real raid controller and 4 drives, raid 6 and fly!