To RAID or Not to RAID? Im confused as it is...

[Vrykyl]

Ok, iv just picked up two 36gb raptors on the cheap (for less than half the cost of one 74gb raptor, so yes I know the 74gb has better access times etc, but at the price I payed I dont care ;) ).
Now iv always intended to get a small capacity, high speed hdd for my OS, and now iv got these 2 raptors on the way I dont know what to do with them...
Someone told me that 'RAID' would be the best performing way to set em up, spreading my OS evenly over the 2 drives so the 2 disks act like one large drive...? Im confused - what is raid really, and how do I set it up? i know my mobo supports it, but there seem to be so many types...i dont know what they all are. I have a 160gb and a 250gb hdd for storage, so backing up my OS is easy, i dont want one raptor constantly backing up onto the other.
Would it perform better to have the 2 on raid (which im told compensates for the slower access time than the 74gb) or keep em seperate and have 1x 36gb drive for the OS and the other for games?

Also, is there a utility I can download/buy that will COMPLETELY copy the contents of my OS drive to the new raid array/new hdd without having to reinstall? so it would empty my current OS drive and make the new setup the new C:\ ?? When i set whatever up I dont want to have to reinstall anything, id rather just copy it off the 160gb OS drive....

Thanks guys,
Vrykyl

[Docta_Z]

Personally if I had what you had.

I'd run them in RAID 1.

There have been quite a few articles of late on this webpage as well as anandtech.com doing tests and finding that RAID 0 isn't really much faster and in some cases slower and less useful then normal operation of a single hd on a desktop computer.

With RAID 1 - you'll never have to worry about data corruption, problems etc etc.

Plus you still get the speed of the raptor - exceeding anything a regular IDE can do.

Sounds great to me.

I believe the program you are looking for is Norton Ghost.

[ajrettke]

I would not RAID 1 them as it will slow performance (the whole reason you get raptors right?)

What RAID 0 does is splits data into 2 parts and sends half to each drive, in theory doubling the bandwidth. In practice it gives a moderate boost, about 50% bandwidth increase, but it also decreases average access time (this is because it has to wait for both drives to find the information instead of one, making it as slow as the slowest access time between the 2 drives).

To be honest with you, I'd see if you could trade the two drives for a 74gb drive. But if that's out of the question then I would run two drives seperate. One drive for your OS, the other drive for your page file system and games that require quick loading.

Raid 0 is more of a bragging tool unless you need high bandwidth transfers (video editing is one thing where RAID 0 is very practicle) but with games it's not really a huge gain.

[Vrykyl]

So basically there is no point in raid for me then? I may as well use this Norton Ghost (if it truely can copy my C:\ in its entirity to another drive, so then I can just blank the 160gb original and windows will still load from the new drive?) and use the other for games etc then...
I do do a lot of video encoding to divx, but I store em on my 250gb sata after...so im guessing again its not worth the effort?

[Wam]

Check the article Overclockers.com from page, it's quite apt to your question. I myself run my 2x36 Raptors in RAID0 but I do a fair amount of video work so I see more benefit. I did a fair bit of research on this before I decided to RAID and came to the same conclusion that for normal windows operation and most games there wasn't much improvemnt. Apparently there is the odd game with large maps that show a greater increase (i.e Battlefield) but this is anecdotal evidence from colleagues and I prefer empirical evidence.

I would probably just go with the 2 single drives as you also won't loose any data if the Stripe goes down or you have to move the drives to another computer (unless you have a PCI controller or it's the same chipset controller).