RAID and Gaming

[Natalia]

What is the Best configuration for RAID if you are solely using the computer for gaming? (Alright I admit I shop for clothes online and write a paper for school here and there )

Currently I have a RAID 0 configuration my friend helped me with. We set up 2
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST380817AS 80GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer
in RAID 0.

I was wondering... would I notice gaming improvement more with which of the following:

1-No Change
2-2 10,000 SATA Drives in RAID 0
3-3 of the same Drives above in RAID 0
4-Some other RAID configuration, i.e. 1,3,5
5-2 Seagate 15,000 RPM Cheeta's in RAID 0
6-Other

Sorry I don't know too much about this, and most of the sites I have gone to can be a little too confusing to me

[uOpt]

Unfortunately that is impossible to say.

Generally program startup is better served with RAID-1 or 10 instead of 0, or to a lesser degree raid-5 is also better at this than raid-0. Because raid-0 does not speed up small reads after random seeks which is what mos prgram startup is made from.

However, some smart games have organized big data files (e.g. map packs, texture packs) in a way that they actually do read them in a linear manner and then they get a substancial speedup out of raid-0.

Of course, after startup it won't matter for a game unless is game is braindead (such as LO:MAC) or if you don't have enough RAM.

My personal recommendation is not to worry about this too much and just get faster drives instead of doing speculation about RAID modes. You can only pick the right RAID mode (and striping size etc.) by actually testing them with your games of choice. You can make it faster by just buying faster drives without testing and fiddling.

[Natalia]

Okay, that seems to help a bit. Let me ask this then, would I see an actual performance increase in a game of a 15,000 RPM hard drives over my 7200's? Particularly in a game environment where the areas are loaded as you get to them, i.e. Oblivion.

[JH_man]

When it comes to raids that would work for gaming / performance I would say you got basicly 2 options: raid 0 and raid 5.

Raid 0 would be a little faster then raid 5, but raid 5 got ALOT better security for your data. I dont know how much you know about the different raid types, but lets take a quick look at those 2 just to make sure we are on the same page. Hope you dont take this the wrong way, just want to make sure we are on same page.

Raid 0:
Disks are all put in one pool of disks, that the OS looks upon as one disk.The OS writes to and read from the 'disk', and the controller that the disks are connected to splits the data and (in a perfect world) read and write data from and to all of the disks at same time. This means each disk need to spend less time pr operation, and this will cut down on the time each read/write takes. Problem with this setup is that if one disk fails, all data is lost.

Raid 5:
To make it simple you can say this work as raid 0, BUT and its a big but, this raid will also save controll data, meaning if one disk fails the system can still work (but slower). So you got time to swap the defect disk out, and your data is still ok. The minimum number of disks for this is 3, also with a 3 disk setup you will 'loose' disk space equal to 1 disk. So if you got 3 disks of each 100 gb, you will have 200 gb disk space. So the problem here for most home users its a bit costly solution, and that kind of data protection is normally not needed for home users.

Also an issue when it comes to raids are the controllers, most onboard raid controllers are just not good enough if you first want a speedy raid and spend money on it, you need a dedicated raid controller card. So my conclusion (also for myself when getting a new comp), is that raid isnt all that usefull for a home user that dont want to spend more money that they need to on a comp. If you really want a fast disk solution, instead get the Raptor disks that are faster (but smaller) then normal IDE disks (gets closer to SCSI disk speeds). And yes, I think you would see a difference, but I dont think its worth the extra money. Maybe its worth having a 15000 disk as the C drive, which will help with swap file speeds. But if the game loads alot of NEW textures all the time it wouldnt help again since game data would not be on same disk. Sure if you want to spend money on it get all 15000 raptor disks, but its like twice the cost of normal ones, and as long as you dont play online games and even in a pro league, I dont see the cost being worth it.


So what I would do if I were you is this (what I am gonna do on my next comp):
- get 2 disks (or more, but dont see the need for more then 2, who really needs more then 500gb available 'online' at all times?! get a burner instead...)

- if you want to make several partitions or not on each disk is up to you, but I dont think there is a performance problem any longer with big partitions and Windows XP (please correct me if I am wrong)

- on the first disk make 2 partitions: C: + 1 more for rest of the space, give C 15 Gb or so (this will ensure alot of space for programs, and at same time space for stupid installers like Battlefield 2 Special Forces and similar stupid installers that wants to unpack several gigs on the C partition)

- making one separat partion for C also ensures you can just wipe the whole C partion if you need to reinstall without also wiping other data. Also with setting it to a 'small' size of 15 gb or so also ensures no other partition will be that small so you dont eccidently wipe the wrong partition if you reinstall

- on the second disk make one or more partitions (2 maybe, 1 for games and 1 for multimedia files etc)

- then set the swap file to a static size and put it on C disk, but on the other partition, not the C partition (the rule of thumb here is set swap file to 1.5 x the size of your ram BUT BUT BUT, there is a roof of how much ram Windows XP can adress, and its around 4 GB, and if I am not wrong this also includes gfx card memory, so I would have 2 GB ram + set the swap file to 1.5 gb or even maybe 1 gb static size. statis size on the swap file also helps slightly with speed vs dynamic size)

- Note: but if you put the swap file not on the C partition remember that if you reinstall you need to show system files so you can delete it after reinstall, dont think the new install will use the old swap file, but not 100% sure

- try to set the swap file on the other partition as the first thing you put on that partition, so it dont get fragmented

- do NOT put your games on same disk as C, but it on the other disk. You want C + swap file on one physical disk and your games on another physical disk, so you will get 2 disks to be able to read game files and swap 'at same time'

Hope this helps

JH_man
norway

[uOpt]

Sorry, that a little inaccurate:

Raid 0 would be a little faster then raid 5, but raid 5 got ALOT better security for your data. I dont know how much you know about the different raid types, but lets take a quick look at those 2 just to make sure we are on the same page. Hope you dont take this the wrong way, just want to make sure we are on same page.

Raid-0 has negative safety (= worse than single disk), raid-5 has positive safety (= better than single disk) is a better way to put it.

Raid 0:
Disks are all put in one pool of disks, that the OS looks upon as one disk.The OS writes to and read from the 'disk', and the controller that the disks are connected to splits the data and (in a perfect world) read and write data from and to all of the disks at same time. This means each disk need to spend less time pr operation, and this will cut down on the time each read/write takes. Problem with this setup is that if one disk fails, all data is lost.

Yeah but you forget to mention that there are patterns that are not sped up by raid-0 at all, such as small reads after random seeks.

Raid-1 can speed up that pattern, and that pattern is what happens a lot when starting most programs.

Raid 5:
To make it simple you can say this work as raid 0, BUT and its a big but, this raid will also save controll data, meaning if one disk fails the system can still work (but slower). So you got time to swap the defect disk out, and your data is still ok. The minimum number of disks for this is 3, also with a 3 disk setup you will 'loose' disk space equal to 1 disk. So if you got 3 disks of each 100 gb, you will have 200 gb disk space. So the problem here for most home users its a bit costly solution, and that kind of data protection is normally not needed for home users.

Software raid-5 works just fine. Stay away from onboard software raid for any kind of safety raid.

The main disadvantage is that reads are sped up compared to single disk but writes are at most as fast as single disk, often slower. Although not an issue with modern CPUs and just a bunch of 7200 disks, CPU usage for writes can be substancial under the wrong circumstances.

Also an issue when it comes to raids are the controllers, most onboard raid controllers are just not good enough if you first want a speedy raid and spend money on it, you need a dedicated raid controller card.

This is not entirely true.

Existing onboard sata RAID solutions get one thing right: performance in raid-0. It is pretty fast as far as I have seen benchmark (I don't use it so I didn't measure myself).

In no event would I use onboard sata raid for any kind of safety raid.

And from what I have seen you never get the speedup that you would expect out of raid-1 with onboard sata raid.

So my conclusion (also for myself when getting a new comp), is that raid isnt all that usefull for a home user that dont want to spend more money that they need to on a comp. If you really want a fast disk solution, instead get the Raptor disks that are faster (but smaller) then normal IDE disks (gets closer to SCSI disk speeds).

That is good advice. Just buying faster disks gets rid of all the headache above.

And yes, I think you would see a difference, but I dont think its worth the extra money. Maybe its worth having a 15000 disk as the C drive, which will help with swap file speeds.

If you want good performance you have to have enough RAM to never use the swapfile in a significant manner anyway.

But DO NOT run without a swapfile, it slows you down.

But if the game loads alot of NEW textures all the time it wouldnt help again since game data would not be on same disk. Sure if you want to spend money on it get all 15000 raptor disks, but its like twice the cost of normal ones, and as long as you dont play online games and even in a pro league, I dont see the cost being worth it.

Games speed depends on harddrive speed only at startup, so it doesn't really matter how serious you are playing.

For game startup it is cearly not the better solution to have boot drive and game drive separate. If the game load sequentially (e.g. Call of Duty) then a raid-0 over the two drives is better.

The reason is that while you load the textures and maps you do not access the OS drive. So the OS drive is idle and you get zero advantage out of having it on it's own disk.

- then set the swap file to a static size and put it on C disk, but on the other partition, not the C partition (the rule of thumb here is set swap file to 1.5 x the size of your ram BUT BUT BUT, there is a roof of how much ram Windows XP can adress, and its around 4 GB, and if I am not wrong this also includes gfx card memory, so I would have 2 GB ram + set the swap file to 1.5 gb or even maybe 1 gb static size. statis size on the swap file also helps slightly with speed vs dynamic size)

That's entirely inaccurate. The 4 GB limit does not apply to total physical memory as define RAM+paging space. If you have 3 GB of RAM and 12 GB of swapspace you can run 15 programs with 1 GB each on 32 bit XP.

Static size is good advice.

However, you should have one paging area on every drive, as I explained earlier.

Overall, none of this matters. If you want a smooth computer you have to have enough RAM to never make serious use of swapspace after the OS and applications are warmed up.

It is far better to run 4 GB of medium-speed RAM than running 2 GB of high-speed RAM if you ever touch the swapspace. And even if you don't touch it it is pften better to have 4 GB slower RAM than 2 GB faster RAM.

- do NOT put your games on same disk as C, but it on the other disk. You want C + swap file on one physical disk and your games on another physical disk, so you will get 2 disks to be able to read game files and swap 'at same time'

Overall, this is not sound advice.

Game loading for games that load sequentially is substancially sped up by raid-0, and as I explained earlier the separate location of boot filesystem and swapspace doesn't buy you anything on a machine that is basically single application (= game).

[Natalia]

Hmm, maybe I should explain how I currently have my hard drives configured.

Right now I have 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST380817AS 80GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer in RAID 0. I also have a 60GB ATA hard drive where all my backup information, and the "My Documents" folder sits. This also is the ONLY drive with a page file, it is 4GB in size. I have PC3200 Corair RAM, 2x1GB Dual Channel, but I will be changing this as I am re-doing my computer (http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=109358). I have 1 Partition across my Raid drives, with windows and all my programs on that drive, since as I mentioned the 3rd drive is all my 'storage'.

So sounds like, if I am understanding correctly, the following are true:
1- Partition the RAID drives with ~15GB for the system.
2- Put a Page File on ALL partitions/drives
3- Faster drives won't be noticable in actual gameplay, even load-as-you go games.

That accurate interpetation?

[uOpt]

Correct, but of course that doesn't mean you can skip two things:

1) you need to decide whether raid-0 is worth the risk

2) you may or may not have games that are sped up by raid-0

[JH_man]

<<
However, you should have one paging area on every drive, as I explained earlier.
>>

Cannot see you say anything about this in this thread. Also I would like to see some kind of test or similar that says its faster to have one paging area on every drive. If such tests could not be shown (and prove a real advantage, not just a millisec here and there), I would never do this, for several reasons.

<<
Game loading for games that load sequentially is substancially sped up by raid-0, and as I explained earlier the separate location of boot filesystem and swapspace doesn't buy you anything on a machine that is basically single application (= game).
>>

I am talking about just single disks in my advice list, I say get 2 disks, and I dont mention raids. When you use single disks its more or less garanteed that swap on one disk and game on other will be the fastest since both disks can read/write at 'the same time', instead of fighting for the disk access. Also not everyone is playing offline games that load a lvl and then you play, most online games dont work like that. With most online games there is a big amout of swap file usage and game data loading all the time, which results in alot of non-sequentially operations.

Another area where its a big advantage to have 2 physical disks is when you either want to zip/pack or unpack big files or packages like typical winrar makes. The fastest here would be to read from one disk and write to the another. Same goes for installations where either the game/program is on one disk and installed on another, or even on cd/dvd but the installer first unpacks the files to disk (typically done to C: partition). I would therefor have my games disk on another physical disk then the C: is on. Also reasons why I am going for 2 single physical disks in my next setup, and no king of raid.

The only reason I would have to go for a raid solution, is if I were given a very good raid controller and disks, and if so it would be a raid 5 with hotswap. HP come to mind here as their hardware kicks ass. And if I were give the money to do it, I would rather get raptor disks and run them as single disks.

<<
3- Faster drives won't be noticable in actual gameplay, even load-as-you go games.
>>

Disagree strongly! In online games like Dark Age of Camelot that I have played for like 5 years now, I can garantee you that faster disks will help noticable. If you dont some how are able to run the whole game from RAM (which you are not with todays games). There are so big amount of textures in the game, every time you run into a group of enemies your biggest problem will be load lagg due to loading/swaping textures. This will also work for other games that have alot of texture loading along the way. Havent played Oblivion, but I am pretty sure there is a big amount of texture loading as you go along there.

And why uOpt is saying software raid is ok is beyond me, one serious software error and the whole raid CAN get corrupt. It will also be slower then hardware raids. I would personally never run one. Neither do I understand what he mean by onboard software raid. Either the raid is software, meaning its all controlled by a program that is running, or its hardware (onboard or on own controller board) and therefor run by the hardware chip controller, meaning its hardware. This is the only nitpicking I will stretch myself to do, since he is kinda contradicting himself here. But not big deal, I think most understand what he means. And no offense intended uOpt, but you pick alot on my post, so I poke you this one time.

I have made my comments here both based on what I know about the issues, but also made based on I have discussed the very same questions you have here Natalia with other technical educated friends of mine, a few months back. And I came to the solution I highlighted here for you; I am going for 2 single disks (read first post for rest of the details on how I will set them up).

But anyway, I have given my advice, and dont intend to use more time picking on other ppls post as long as its not directly wrong. Either you take the advice or you dont, I have at least given you a working solution that I can garantee you will work very well no matter what games you play.

JH_man

[Natalia]

How about this:

Keep my 2 7200 RPM Drives in Raid 0, and my old ATA as a backup.

Then add a super fast single drive, 15000 RPM, w/o RAID, and install only games on it. Would that be a good way to go?

4 Drives total:
2 RAID System/Misc Stuff
1 Super Fast Game drive
1 Backup drive

With that solution, I would only have to buy one relatively small drive since only three or four games would ever be on it at a single time.

What do you think?

[JH_man]

That would work. Also looking at the other thread about SLI I would also suggest you to get a Raptor disk as I have also said before, not he Cheetah.

Also remember the cheetah is SCSI, so it will get alot more expensive then the WD Raptor (fastest IDE drive around as I know) since you need also a good SCSI controll card. But of course if you got the money the SCSI is the fastest one, but if I dont remember wrong the scsi disks will also be more noisy and produce more heat...but dont arrest me on this.

Also take a look at this site and its reviews if you dont have seen it already:
http://www.storagereview.com/

JH_man

[uOpt]

How about this:

Keep my 2 7200 RPM Drives in Raid 0, and my old ATA as a backup.

Then add a super fast single drive, 15000 RPM, w/o RAID, and install only games on it. Would that be a good way to go?

4 Drives total:
2 RAID System/Misc Stuff
1 Super Fast Game drive
1 Backup drive

With that solution, I would only have to buy one relatively small drive since only three or four games would ever be on it at a single time.

What do you think?

I dunno. the cost of SCSI controller and disk, apart from heat/noise makes it a questionable choice compared to, say getting two SATA 10,000 and raid-0ing them.

What you need to find out is which of your games that has annoying startup times is sped up by raid-0, which is sped up by (good, not onboard sata junk) raid-1 and which is only sped up by faster drives.

I think you will find that the amount of games that have all of
- annoying startup time
- will not improve on raid-0
- show an improvement of 15,000 rpm over 10,000 rom
is very small.

If you don't have them already 4 GB of RAM are certainly the overall better investment.

[uOpt]

Can you please properly quote?

I don't like what I said being labeled as somebody else's.

<<
However, you should have one paging area on every drive, as I explained earlier.
>>

Cannot see you say anything about this in this thread. Also I would like to see some kind of test or similar that says its faster to have one paging area on every drive. If such tests could not be shown (and prove a real advantage, not just a millisec here and there), I would never do this, for several reasons.

It is obvious that paging area should be placed on all drives.

And that is particularly true for machines that usually only focus on one application.

The paging area is only used when the OS needs to find new pages and when there are no readonly pages mapped and filesystem buffer cache pages that are obviously droppable. Only anonymous mapped pages and modified copy-on-write pages are even written into swapspace.

At the time that this happens the OS just admitted that it is in deep trouble.

The system is practically stalling when this happens unless you are lucky enough to have several other processes running that can continue to use CPU time without touching an pages not currently resident.

Since the system is stalling anyway, you must seek to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.

Moving a bunch of random pages out to disk is painstaikingly obviously much faster when they are distributed to as many disks as possible.

I don't really know what the question here is.

<<
Game loading for games that load sequentially is substancially sped up by raid-0, and as I explained earlier the separate location of boot filesystem and swapspace doesn't buy you anything on a machine that is basically single application (= game).
>>

I am talking about just single disks in my advice list, I say get 2 disks, and I dont mention raids. When you use single disks its more or less garanteed that swap on one disk and game on other will be the fastest since both disks can read/write at 'the same time', instead of fighting for the disk access.

That's a misunderstanding.

If swapspace is currently being written to then there will be no reading of data for the game.

The swapspace is written to to make room for new pages to fill by the game's data, so the game is stalled until the lack of allocatable pages is resolved.

Normally, your advice is correct: you want to put reading things and writing things on different disks.

And you would normally have the writes delayed by the filesystem buffer cache, which means if you don't have them on a separate disk from your reading then you will be "echoes" of disturbing disk activity for an extended period of time.

However, this is not true in the case of writing to swap, since writing to swap means there is a stall. Also, during this situation, which is a "short of memory" situation you will not see the filesystem buffer cache used much, because that would take memory.

So, in summary, while it is a good idea to put reads and writes on different disks, for swapspace it doesn't matter. Swapspace should be on all disks.

Also not everyone is playing offline games that load a lvl and then you play, most online games dont work like that. With most online games there is a big amout of swap file usage and game data loading all the time, which results in alot of non-sequentially operations.

Big usage of swap space? That shouldn't happen.

If it happens, then forget about faster disks or fancy raids. What you need is more memory.

I take your word that the games continue loading during play, I also have some games that constantly mess around with files. But that doesn't change the fact that the proper fix for swapping is more memory, not mucking with the disks. If you can't solve it by more memory, then swapspace on as many disks as possible.

Another area where its a big advantage to have 2 physical disks is when you either want to zip/pack or unpack big files or packages like typical winrar makes. The fastest here would be to read from one disk and write to the another. Same goes for installations where either the game/program is on one disk and installed on another, or even on cd/dvd but the installer first unpacks the files to disk (typically done to C: partition). I would therefor have my games disk on another physical disk then the C: is on. Also reasons why I am going for 2 single physical disks in my next setup, and no king of raid.

Absolutely correct.

If you can organize applications so that you can deliberately distribute operations of different huge file in a way that these files live on different disks, that beats any raid any day.

Another application area for this is audio/video encoding, at least when very fast compression or no compression is used. For intense compression it doesn't matter because the CPU is the bottleneck.

<<
3- Faster drives won't be noticable in actual gameplay, even load-as-you go games.
>>

Disagree strongly! In online games like Dark Age of Camelot that I have played for like 5 years now, I can garantee you that faster disks will help noticable.

Me, too. Faster disks are, next to RAM, the major improvement for computer usage.

And why uOpt is saying software raid is ok is beyond me, one serious software error and the whole raid CAN get corrupt.

Not sure what you mean here. If you OS screws up and wipes blocks all over the place you are screwed no matter what.

The raid software running in the kernel is no more or less suspectible to errors than the software running in the firmware of the controller. Both are raid software which may or may not experience bugs that wipe your data.

Of course you should never, ever, use one of the onboard SATA raid things for any redundant raid.

It will also be slower then hardware raids.

No. For raid-0 and raid-1 you have practially no CPU overhead at all. It is the simplest code you can imagine, I can post the parts both from Linux and FreeBSD here in one page. If you non-raid disk controller is as good a disk controller as the one in the raid controller, both end up with the same speed. I already linked to my benchmarks.

For raid-5 it's a little different, but modern CPUs are fast enough to take that without problems, too. The hardware raid controller will beat software raid here, but not by too much of a margin anymore.

I would personally never run one. Neither do I understand what he mean by onboard software raid. Either the raid is software, meaning its all controlled by a program that is running, or its hardware (onboard or on own controller board) and therefor run by the hardware chip controller, meaning its hardware. This is the only nitpicking I will stretch myself to do, since he is kinda contradicting himself here. But not big deal, I think most understand what he means. And no offense intended uOpt, but you pick alot on my post, so I poke you this one time.

Yeah, you misunderstand. The onboard sata raid solution do run in software, of course, but they are not "software raid". With software raid I mean something that your OS does without any help from BIOS or disk controller, such as ccd, gmirror or raidframe in BSD or Linux raid. Windows also has this, although in a more limited form.

The onboard sata stuff seriously suffers from the integration of drivers and BIOS, non-ability to use partitions before RAID, unreliability and missed speedup opportunities such as in raid-1. I don't use that.

[Natalia]

How about this:

Keep my 2 7200 RPM Drives in Raid 0, and my old ATA as a backup.

Then add a super fast single drive, 15000 RPM, w/o RAID, and install only games on it. Would that be a good way to go?

4 Drives total:
2 RAID System/Misc Stuff
1 Super Fast Game drive
1 Backup drive

With that solution, I would only have to buy one relatively small drive since only three or four games would ever be on it at a single time.

What do you think?

uOpt Did you have any comment on this setup I was thinking about?

Also, will the new Motherboards coming out, the 590's to be exact, not already support that SCSI Disk?

[uOpt]

uOpt Did you have any comment on this setup I was thinking about?

Also, will the new Motherboards coming out, the 590's to be exact, not already support that SCSI Disk?

No, for SCSI you need an extra controller and I'm not sure there are cheap and decent PCIe offerings these days. And there are no 15,000 rpm SATA drives.

That is why I said it is probably smarter for you to invest money first into more memory and then 10,000 rpm disks, maybe only one disk.

If you have two 7200 disks RAID-0ed and a single 10,000 disk, then you can move your games around and try things out. Leave those games that speed up from raid-0 on the array and put those that don't on the 10,000 rpm.

And some backup at least for the raid-0 is required. Probably best done by a cheap big disk in a USB enclosure.

[zillaoc]

i run option 2 and luv it...

[gr8golf]

I've been thinking this over while considering a Conroe build and I've pretty much decided to replace my 36GB Raptors in RAID 0 with a single Raptor 150GB drive. I'll install the OS and all my games on the Raptor and use my 300GB drive for file storage.

RAID 0 has always *felt* faster to me when loading the OS and games / programs - so I hope the new Raptor will *feel* as fast or faster. If it doesn't I'll do the same thing I have on my last few builds - start the install over again with two Raptor 150's in RAID 0.

[SexyMF]

I use 2x150GB drives in Raid-0 and an older 80GB as my OS. Raid(-0) is the best thing you can for a system. There is no other way to significantly speed up things in the storage subsystem. Faster HDDs offer only marginal performance increase whereas Raid (0, 0+1) offer excellent access increase.

I also do not see Raid-0 as any more of a risk than a single HDD. A faulty HDD is a faulty HDD and it matters not what it is apart of. If you are really worried about your data, either backup or use 4 HDD and have speed and redundancy in another Raid configuration.

Also, I don't see how you can stop windows using the paging file. More ram never worked for me. It always miffed me when you can see there is much free physical ram available but windows is using the paging file anyway. Never figured out why.

[SexyMF]

I must also mention that I am a gamer and the difference that raid0 made to load times was incredible.

[Natalia]

No, for SCSI you need an extra controller and I'm not sure there are cheap and decent PCIe offerings these days. And there are no 15,000 rpm SATA drives.

That is why I said it is probably smarter for you to invest money first into more memory and then 10,000 rpm disks, maybe only one disk.

If you have two 7200 disks RAID-0ed and a single 10,000 disk, then you can move your games around and try things out. Leave those games that speed up from raid-0 on the array and put those that don't on the 10,000 rpm.

And some backup at least for the raid-0 is required. Probably best done by a cheap big disk in a USB enclosure.

I thought anything past 2GB of RAM was pointless...

[gr8golf]

I use 2x150GB drives in Raid-0 and an older 80GB as my OS. Raid(-0) is the best thing you can for a system. There is no other way to significantly speed up things in the storage subsystem. Faster HDDs offer only marginal performance increase whereas Raid (0, 0+1) offer excellent access increase.

Well - this is subjectively what I always thought to be true. Windows and games *appear* to load way faster when run from a RAID 0 array. But most reviewers / benchmarkers report that the gains are negligible at best. Like I said - I'll get the Raptor 150 and install XP and one game and see how it *feels*. If it doesn't measure up to what I am used to with my existing setup, I'll plug in another Raptor 150 and stripe them. Wish those damn things weren't so expensive - it would make the decision a lot easier up front.

[phelan1777]

here is my .02, using SCSI on a home computer, unless you are running a serious server, I don't see the need. Using RAID, again not really unless you need large data moving.

I wanted to use RAID, but just can't bring myself to do it.

I have my Boot drive, regular IDE, then I have my GAME drive, 10Krpm 74GB Raptor, and my Storage drive for everything else - 200GB Seatgate 7200.7 SATA.

I load Oblivion fast enough for me, and if I need more data storage, I have two PLX 716SA CD-R/W-DVD-RW. I am debating getting a second RAPTOR, if I do, then I might use RAID, just for the hell of it.

Wish those damn things weren't so expensive - it would make the decision a lot easier up front.

This is so true

[Natalia]

Would a Raptor really be noticably faster than my Baracudas? Or are we talking about milliseconds here?

[phelan1777]

Would a Raptor really be noticably faster than my Baracudas? Or are we talking about milliseconds here?

you are talking 10KRPM vs 7200RPM for one, Then you can look at the stats between the two drives and decide for yourself.

I have a Baracuda, and a RAptor, I think the RAptor is faster in accessing files and what not, they are both SATA.

[RangerXLT8]

No questions asked, the 15K cheetas are the fastest drives you listed. LEt's be real here, 15K cheetas are server\workstation drives and have no room on a dekstop, they generate alot of heat to. To run these drives a very expensive SCSI controller will be needed. I've used SCSI drives in the past and they just are not meant for desktops, they are loud as hell and run hot.

Your best bet would be to get 2x10,000rpm Raptors, which will plug right into your MB and can be set up in RAID0. For best system performance, install the OS\games\apps on the 10K RAID array and use your other drives as backup\storage.

I'm the first person on the BF:2 map every round, this is because I run BF:2 off a 3xRaptor RAID0 array.

[Natalia]

you are talking 10KRPM vs 7200RPM for one, Then you can look at the stats between the two drives and decide for yourself.

I have a Baracuda, and a RAptor, I think the RAptor is faster in accessing files and what not, they are both SATA.

Not sure if that answers my question or not... My Baracuda's are in RAID, but it sounds like we have already addressed that. Hmmr.