Seeking Raid0 advice for my config

Hi!
I recently built a new machine with an evga 680i LT SLI mobo and 2 WD 7200rpm 320MB SATA drives.

Without a separate Raid controller card, should I bother to set up Raid 0?

I use this computer primarily for gaming and general computing tasks. I have browsed through many forums and have gotten the impression that I won't see a noticeable performance increase by setting up Raid 0. Is this correct?

Please assume that redundancy is not a concern for this setup. Thanks for any advice!

Not totally correct. It depends on what you do. Usually games do not see much improvement. SOme that have loading maps and zones may be a tad faster.

The real benefit from raid 0 is when you do lots of disk intensive things like video editing or rendering.

games like battlefield 2142 loading map is much better with my raid0 setup

I notice much faster times since going to RAID 0 for: Boot times, Oblivion loads when going inside or switching areas, BF2142/TF2/HL2/Bioshock/etc level loads. Probably a couple other things. Naysayers will tell you that your write speeds may go down slightly (gasp!) but in my case, the limiting factor to my writes is always the input - internet connection, optical drive, etc. If saving games takes 5% longer, I've never noticed cause they save so darn fast anyway..

It's not gonna raise your FPS or anything like that, but if you don't like waiting around for levels to load, you will see a nice difference. I find it helps with the immersion factor.

The benefits of RAID are also chipset dependant. Some RAID0 setups I'd get a 10-15% decrease in booting and app launch, others I'd get nothing. With my last NF4 RAID0 setup, boot times were no faster, and Oblivion launch and loading was no faster. This was timed, not seat of the pants guesstimation.

I've had my Raid0 for about 4 yrs and it is faster for anything that accesses the disks including loading games, imaging, video, etc. I tested throughput when I first set it up and it was almost twice as fast as a single disk.

raid is made of win. I notice speed increases in almost everything i do. Its defiantly worth it. On board raid will do just fine now a days.

Thanks for all of the replies, everybody. I'm going to hem and haw over it for a little bit because of the time it will take to get everything back up, but I think I just have to try it out.

I'll look for a good HD metrics tool first so I can do a pre- and post-Raid test.

Throughput doesn't automatically mean better performance, and saying so means you really haven't conducted a real world test to find this out. Without a stop watch and diligent testing, people's imaginations run wild.

Hi all,
I thought I'd come back and post my pre- and post-Raid results from HD Tune.

Pre-Raid: Single 320GB WD SE16-type 7200 rpm drive
xfer rate (min/max/avg): 33/79.3/61.5 MB/s
Random Access: 12.5ms
Burst: 125.1 MB/s
CPU: 51.4 %

Post-Raid: 2 of the same drives as above in Raid 0 configuration
xfer rate: 65.8/132.7/110.8
RA: 12.4
Burst: 126.5
CPU: 5%

This system has an evga 680i LT SLI mobo, WinXP Pro SP2, an Intel e6750 and 2GB RAM.

One thing I noticed during the test is that the xfer rate stuck fairly closely to the 125MB/s line for fully the first half of the drive, which is where I had located my OS, swap, and gaming partitions. I don't believe this has anything to do with Raid but thought I'd throw it in.

Hope this is helpful.

1 raptor will feel faster at everything then your raid setup

Your raid setup may excel slightly in dealing with huge 2+gb files but most all files are way smaller then that so you wont see the advantage of the raid but you will lose everything if 1 drive messes up.

Of course opinions are like a$$holes, everyone's got one. Here's mine.

You also need to set up raid with the right stripe size for what you do. It's been a few years but I believe I went with 16k stripe since I do mostly smaller files under 5mb. I played with different stripe sizes and tested throughput using SiSandra (?). You benefit from Raid0 on files over 50ish mb, not 2gb+.

The numbers for transfer rates are close to what I got pre- and post- raid0.

Yes, it's not fault tolerant so it's really not a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Indepentant) Drives). I mostly have OS and program files on the Raid0 and a second drive where I store my data. I backup stuff from the Raid about once a month or sooner if there's stuff I don't want to lose.

I just ordered a new mobo, cpu, memory, psu and video card to upgrade my aging system. The new mobo has a ICH9R controller so it'd be interesting if my current drive config will carry over to the new controller.

Yes I like Raid0 but it's not for everyone. I've ran both single disk and Raid0 on the same system using the same apps and I find that my system ran faster with Raid0 overall, especially game load times and photoshop editing.