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Thinking of setting up RAID 0..

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Joshh100

Member
Joined
Nov 20, 2002
Hey.. I was just wondering if anyone here uses a RAID 0 configuration for gaming (or if that is the best one) or if it makes any difference in performance at all. It doesnt need to be good for gaming only but just for transferring files from one to the other etc etc.. I have 1 120 gb wd and 1 80 gb wd.. they are both IDE drives. Just let me know of your experiences/what you think. Thanks!
 
oh yeah.. also does it matter that one has an 8mb buffer and one has a 2 mb buffer? thanks..
 
Drives in raid run hotter since they're accessed more, so monitor their temps. Depending on the drive, you may need a fan blowing on them to keep them adequately cooled.

If you know you'll be working with huge files, raid 0 will help you a lot.

Your raid setup will be twice as fast as your slowest drive. Performance from a 2mb buffer to 8mb is probably minimal so I wouldn't go spend extra money just to match them.

Since you have one 80 and one 120gb hdd, your raid 0 will be 160gbs (since it's two times the smallest drive).

I personally went from one 7.2k IDE drive to two 10, raptors in raid 0, so my experience will be different from yours :). Generally you won't experience much increase in performance just browsing, etc since access times increase slightly. As mentioned, the real benefits are when you need to read/write large data.
 
And raid 0 has no data protection, so failure rate is something to consider. If one of the drives fail, all is lost.

I used a 2*40gb raid 0 on my previous setup (now my home lan server) and it was nice. But to me, the improvement in speed was not too noticeable, so running a single drive in my current setup is no big loss.
 
Ya im thinking of getting a controller instead of using my onboard .. I heard they are better.. So Id like to know which are good.. :) I know Promise and Highpoint make good ones.. but dont know if some models are better than others..

btw.. I love my raid.. you wont regret it .. mostly you'll notice more speed ..booting.. loading games\maps in games.. moving big files..
 
In terms of controllers, the lower end ones like Promise and HighPoint are good (these are not true 100% hardware-based adapters), although you will likely get better performance/options with a hardware-based adaptor from 3Ware, Adaptec, and others which of course cost significanly more. For home use, I would use a Promise adapter.
 
would something like this be ok to use for my IDE drives? I may also just buy another 120 gig hdd for 90 dollars or something like that..
 
You could use tha with a software raid set up in windows.But I would not ...

Look at the for sale area if you have enough posts in storage for a raid card ata 133
 
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