RAID 0

**investigater** · 03-31-08, 11:36 AM

Ok, i am wanting to run my two seagate 120gig SATAs in raid 0. I have googled and searched on the how toos but have not really found anything that has helped me understand how to go about it. I guess i should start with my MoBo with you all to see if it will even work. I have a Gigabyte p35-DS3L. It has 4 SATA plugs which i only have 2 used. Secondly, will this increase read/write time as compared to using no RAID options and i do know about the "if one of the drives fails, all the data is damaged." If I can get RAID to work, do i need to download a file or something to use during installation of windows?

EDIT:
"RAID 0 uses a method called striping. Striping takes a single chunk of data like a graphic image, and spreads that data across multiple drives. The advantage that striping has is in improved performance. Twice the amount of data can be written in a given time frame to the two drives compared to that same data being written to a single drive."

I answered one of my own questions. But it did raise on question, as a gamer, will this give me any benefits?

**Mcstrange** · 03-31-08, 11:47 AM

Why?

raid 0 will make things slightly faster, but again why?

**Pineapple!** · 03-31-08, 11:52 AM

Originally Posted by Mcstrange

Why?

raid 0 will make things slightly faster, but again why?

I think you answered your own question.

**Hocus Pocus** · 03-31-08, 11:53 AM

eh doesnt that cut the life of your hd in half?

**investigater** · 03-31-08, 11:57 AM

Originally Posted by Hocus Pocus

eh doesnt that cut the life of your hd in half?

I have no idea and i was asking if it would improve anything as far as being a gamer. No other reason in doing it but that. I dont need the hard time for asking a perfectly fine and legit question. Some of us dont know the answer to everything...

**Mcstrange** · 03-31-08, 12:06 PM

Yes, you would have an improvement in performance, probably not anything noticeable in game, but load times would be faster.

some links:
http://www.pctechguide.com/tutorials/RAID.htm

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.c...eid=830&page=6

**Hocus Pocus** · 03-31-08, 12:11 PM

i was thinkin of getting just a small sshd with xp on it for a gaming rig.

**WileECyte** · 03-31-08, 12:20 PM

I believe SoySoldier is running RAID 0.

**investigater** · 03-31-08, 12:36 PM

Well, i love the fact of being able to have both drives working as opposed to one of them working at a time. I have one drive full of nothing but games and utilities for benchmarking among others and the other drive with vista and its programs along with music, pics and other crap. That being said, i dont know if raid would help my situation any. I had raid when i first got this rig but that was a different mobo, processor, ram, vid card, and power supply ago. I think for that slower rig that it was the best for it but now with all the latest things i have in it now, I would not benefit from it. I do like the idea of it though. Its hard to make up my mind...... And i also havent figured out if my mobo is even capable of doing a switch over to raid0.... Must keep reading...

**Consultant** · 03-31-08, 12:42 PM

I ran RAID-0 for years and when I re-built this last time I went away from it.

My thought was that having 2 HDDs with my data on them being dependent of one another doubled my risk of data loss due to a bad drive.

Other kinds of RAID are designed for data redundancy and security like 0+1 (I think I remember that correctly) but that calls for 4 drives setup in a pair of RAID-0 arrays.

The performance boost is just for read/write speeds which in-game only affects load times and even at that, I don't think it cut them in half or anything like that.

Waiting 35 seconds for a map to load isnt THAT different than waiting 20-25 seconds when you consider that if just one of those RAID-0 drives goes belly-up, you lose everything.