RAID or not RAID

[Roady]

Hi

Im thikning of building a new Pc and what it to be realy quick. On this topic I just want hard drive config advice.
Im thinking about using RAID 0 configuration on two 500Gb 7200 rpm drives. RAID 0 provides striping across two drives, which means faster read\write speeds yeah?
Or would it be best to buy one 150Gb 10,000rpm drive and use it as a single drive for the O/S. What speed diference do you think there would be in between the two configurtions? would it be un noiticable!!!.

Or I suppose I could push the boat out and get two 150Gb drives @ 10,000 rpm and raid 0 them!! Would there be any advantage doing this?

I understand that I would loose redundancy using RAID 0 rather than the RAID 1 mirroring technique.

[yawningdog]

I wouldn't go through the trouble unless you've determined that disk latency is your bottleneck. For computers like exchange servers and other big database servers, it's usually a good idea. But on a game machine, probably not worth it. That is, unless you're using MS desk management to create the array and it costs you nothing to build. I wouldn't buy a separate raid controller though.

I like where your head is though. Another good way to increase performance is to go out and buy and old 10 gb drive and put your page file on its own disk. That way, page-to-disk takes a lot less traffic and spin time.

[Roady]

Ok thanks for that bit of advice. Yeah im wary of the page file now after reading other topics on this, ill keep it on a seperate partition or drive for definate.

As goes for the RAID; I'll probably just get one 150Gb 10,000rpm drive and split that for my two O/S (XP 64Bit/Vista 64Bit). And ill use my 300GB 72,000rpm drive for various partitions for different data i.e DVD films, photos, oh and my page file of course!!!

Is it best to install games on the same drive as the O/S? or use a gaming partion on the internal 300Gb drive, I wont be installing many anyway!

Cheers

[Variable]

Put in 8GB of RAM andno page file. I saw an article somewhere that said that was the magic number to get rid of the page file. May have been on tomshardware. The basic point is that you don't want to use a page file. It is slow. If you have enough physical RAM the page file is not needed. At the very least you could reduce it to the barest minimum like say 100MB.

[Roady]

Will that idea only work using Vista 64Bit, due to XP limitations of only ever able to see 3gig of RAM at most?

[odannyboy000]

Or XP 64 bit. Just as long as its 64bit

[Roady]

I see, got ya. Thanks

Well on my old system that I still have I downloaded Partion magic 8.0 and played around with partitions, where i made a 1.6gig partition mapped it to S: and labelled it Swap file, rebooted, then changed my swap file location to this new partition. So I know I can do this now a treat.

Roady