RAID And You (A Guide To RAID-0/1/5/6/xx)

[MediumRare]

Sorry to bring this back from a 2 month hibernation but it's such a awesome thread that I don't think most will mind. I'm in the middle of a new build, see specs below, and I purchased two wd6400aaks 640gb drives with the intention of putting them in a RAID 0 config. This build will be mainly used for gaming, surfing and normal family use.

1) After reading the info in this thread am I correct in coming to the conclusion that RAID 0 would not be much of a benefit for this system?

2) Would I be better off using RAID 1 and enabling elevator seek since it was stated, "Use RAID-1 when: You have a game or application that would greatly benefit from a reduction in seek time (lots of small file reading going on)"

2a) Total rookie question regarding drives but if the answer to #2 is yes then how does one enable elevator seek.

3) I also have a 160GB SATA drive laying around not being used so would I be better off ditching any type of RAID and having both my WD 640's as separate drives and doing something like this:

WD 640 #1: 15GB-20GB partition for OS / rest of drive for storage, backup
WD 640 #2: Partition w/ Games & Apps / partition with Documents (photos & music)
160GB: 6GB partition for page file / rest for whatever

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I really thought gaming performance would be increased using RAID 0, glad I stumbled upon this thread.

[IanB]

You can't "enable" elevator seek. It's an algorithm that's either used by your RAID controller to manage RAID1 volumes or it's not, it's a function of the controller firmware.

FWIW, I'd RAID1 the 640Gb drives and use the 160Gb spare as your pagefile/temp drive (small first partition) with the rest for less critical data storage. Make a small OS/apps partition on the RAID1 then put documents etc. you'd consider critical and worth backing up in the rest of the space, so you have the RAID redundancy for that. To use the spare drive for temp files, set the environment variables TEMP and TMP to point to the drive (right-click My Computer, Properties/Advanced/Environment Variables, set for all users and the separate system ones too). Putting your Internet cache there and away from your OS wouldn't be a bad idea either. That way you have spare spindles always available for writing temp files etc. and the RAID set interface doesn't become a bottleneck.

Other people will have other ideas I'm sure. There's probably no wrong way to use the two drives, but RAID1 will give you more security over outright speed, and with those drives you already have great baseline speed anyway. It doesn't matter if the 160Gb drive isn't a screamer, you don't really need the speed for temp stuff, just the ability to access in parallel with other file I/O should help improve system responsiveness.