Windows XP - RAID 0 or regular IDE?

[PatP]

Well, I'm quite sure this type of question has popped up somewhere on this board before but after spending an hour looking for threads, I'm starting to doubt my searching capabilities.

Here's my setup:

-Asus A7V333 motherboard w/onboard Promise RAID controller
-Athlon 1800+ XP
-768MB DDR
-2 WD Caviar 600BB 60gig 7200RPM
-Asus 40X CDROM
-Plextor 12/8/32 CDRW
-ATI Radeon 7500
-Intel NIC
-Logitech Cordless Freedom Optical (keyboard / mouse)


My question is:

In using Windows XP for 80% gaming, what would be a preferable solution?

a) Setting up a RAID 0 120gig array. Stripe size? Cluster size?

b) Setting up both drives as regular IDE (still using the RAID IDE ports). Installing Windows XP on one drive. Installing the pagefile (swapfile?) on the other drive. Creating one partition for game installations / program installations and another partition for downloads and frequently changing files?

c) Something else?


Any advice would be greatly appreciated,

Patrick

[mbigna]

I set my Dragon+ for RAID-0. I game alot on this rig--particularly FPS's with LARGE maps. Load times went down to about one second compared to a minute or so waiting for some of those things to load. I'm never going back.

As far as stripe size is concerned, much self-optimizing/testing will have to be done. Depending on things like what type of drives you have and what size files you open or write will show different performances even with the same stripe size.

I know there is a link to an article where stripe size vs. file sizes and applications were tested. It showed that a 64K stripe was almost always the WORST size. Yet, I have my rig set to 64K because it ran my apps and loaded the stuff I used a little faster than the smaller sizes. Go figure...

[parkan]

Using striping is STRONGLY recommended for swap/pagefile. The increase in performance is *very* noticable

[stereo555]

Definitly go RAID-0 (best performance is 32K or 16K for the cluster size). I myself am using 64K cluster RAID-0 with XP Pro and gaming is just fine . Iam thinking of going to 32k clusters this weekend just to see the how well it performs . All in all , you'll really like going RAID-0 .:D :cool: :D