[RingWraith2086]

I'm trying to decide whether to order another HDD and set up a RAID or just stick with the 40GB that should be here tomorrow. See sig for system specs, but I was wondering if RAID is really that big of a difference. Should I really go ahead and do it or is it going to be so minute that I won't even know the difference. Excuse me if this is an absolute newb question, but I am an absolute newb.

[nodark]

well, I've got a 120gb maxtor (2mb cache) as the primary slave for backup purposes and I have 2 more of the same drives in a RAID 0 setup and the biggest improvement/speed boost that I can see is on benchmarks
the benchmarks (btw, my primary master and slave score around the same, so it's not a slave issue) are almost double for the RAID setup(using ATTO, HDDTach, Sandra)
I don't run my OS from the RAID drives or anything really, so I (I can only speak for myself) can't really say that it's noticeably faster
do you REALLY notice an overall improvement when overclocking your system by 200mhz or upping your fsb from 133 to 166? I honestly don't but the benches say it's running faster, so I guess it is...

[thorilan]

if you use programs like photoshop or if you defrag a lot its very noticeable as the write speeds are much faster but if you are looking for speed for seek times you arnt gonna see a real diference

[UnseenMenace]

I personally think that RAID is over rated and served a purpose when drives were really slow, with the fast access time available now with large buffers of 8mb on some drives.. The advantages of raid is simply not seen for the average user expecially if using a OS like XP which is known to have poor raid performance.

[RingWraith2086]

Alrighty, I got my answer. Thanks everyone.

[nikhsub1]

Originally posted by UnseenMenace
I personally think that RAID is over rated and served a purpose when drives were really slow, with the fast access time available now with large buffers of 8mb on some drives.. The advantages of raid is simply not seen for the average user expecially if using a OS like XP which is known to have poor raid performance.

UM, I would have to disagree with you there. Especially with the 10K Raptors and the ICHR5 for example. This setup is extremely fast and very noticable over a single drive. I do agree with you that the 'average' user may not notice any big difference but not many here are that average user As far as XP giving bad raid performance, again I disagree. If you use the right raid device, you should not have any issues. Here is my ATTO for kicks:

[Pla]

All I can say is:
When I play UT2003 when loading levels it would take between 15 secs up to 1 min. Now it takes between 7 secs up to 30 secs.

So yes, 30 seconds less waiting and entering the level before the enemy has captured the first flag is noticable.

Also the OS boots faster.
Editing video is faster.
And most important - transfering video from the camcorder is better now - no dropped frames.
It works in real time so it is not an issue of waiting 30 minutes or 15 minutes. It is in 15 minutes do you save all the frames from the camcorder or just some of them.

So it depends on what you use it for. And how you configure it.

If somebody is just using it for internet and word - he doesn't need more then 500 MHz Celeron and 128MB mem and 5400 rpm single silent drive. He will be better of with faster printer not faster computer...

[UnseenMenace]

Originally posted by nikhsub1
If you use the right raid device, you should not have any issues. Here is my ATTO for kicks:

This is the problem, if you obtain the correct raid device you should get no problems.. however searching google brings up a lot of reports of problems with people using WinXP who have not got the correct device.
Out of curiousity have you compared your ATTO scores to those of a Win2000, Win98, or Linux install running raid on your system. To get a fair perspective of what is good raid performance you must obviously be comparing it to different OS's running on your system systems.
From my experiences with my fathers Abit KT7a-Raid Windows XP write performance is lacking and this has been experienced by a number of people such as this thread and I have seen other reports on different forums, the problem strangely enough seems more common on IDE raid and particulary onboard raid. I can not state why but formating my fathers system and installing Win2000 with no other changes produced massive performance gains.

[Bobby]

ICH5R onboard bypasses the PCI bus so there's a speed bump there as well. I'm getting 90-92mb/s with my Maxtor 7200 SATA drives. It definitely makes a difference when working with video and playing games.

I don't think it's worth getting a PCI card on a desktop for raid though.

-Bobby

[steve75382]

What IS the correct device, anyway? I'm planning on getting a RAID array setup soley for game loading purposes. Any heads up on a good PCI add-on for RAID 1 & 0? (don't care about the others)

[thorilan]

if you do buy a card make it a promise fast trak