What do I need to set-up RAID 0 Hard drives?

[cmeyvin]

My specs are:

ANTEC Truepower quattro 1000W
ANTEC 900 Black Casing
8GB RAM DDR2 1066Mhz
2X HD4870X2 Crossfirex
DFI LANPARTY DK LGA775 T2-RS X48
Intel Core 2 quad q9550, 3.3Ghz OC
500GB, @ 7200rpm

And suggest me which Hard drive to buy for this system. I heard RAID 0 is much faster than my current one.

[Paul Komski]

You would need at least two SATA hard drives. The better matched they are the better so try and get exactly the same models. The board supports SATA 3Gb/s so don't get 1.5Gb/s drives. The more drives one puts into a RAID-0 array the greater the benefit ought to be and the greater the chance that the array will get broken with loss of any data on the array.

I would suggest two small velociraptors for best results and use these for your system but also get a large separate drive (or use your specified 500Gig drive) to hold your backups and any images of your system array so that recovery is done easily.

Personally I think just using a lone velociraptor not in any RAID would be more than ample for most home users not using specialised hardware RAID on expensive host controller boards. That call is yours of course. A high quality card with a number of SAS drives would be expensive but would give the max performance.

[cmeyvin]

I wanna try RAID coz a guy told me that my system is really good, but for the hard drive i'll be better with RAID. Shall I follow his words or will i be good to go with my 500GB. I use this PC for gaming

[Paul Komski]

Shall I follow his words or will i be good to go with my 500GB.

For RAID-0 you will need at least 2 hard drives. If you already have the 500gig drive why not see how you like it.

Just remember that if you buy additional drives in order to setup RAID-0 that you should take extra precautions to backup anything important on a very regular basis. RAID-0 is particularly hard to recover data from if the array gets corrupted/broken and virtually impossible if one hard drive in the array fails.

Dedicated gamers are better advised than me to indicate how much extra performance you will get from RAID but I think that disk access time is what is probably the most important aspect (and of less importance once the application has been loaded into RAM) and the main benefits of RAID-0 are generally to improve the read/write times for large file i/o operations to the hard drive or array, while running windows.

My own view is that getting one small 10k rpm velociraptor and using it as your system drive (but retaining your 500 gig SATA for data and backup purposes) would be money better spent than grabbing another 500 gig SATA and creating an enormous 1TB RAID-0 array.

Also bear in mind that RAID-1 mirrors have improved read times though write times are akin to a normal single drive. The advantage of a mirror is that if one drive fails you carry on working because each drive is a clone of the other one.

[cmeyvin]

So u mean use the Velociraptor for storing windows on it and the 500Gigs for data such as games, movies and programs?

[Paul Komski]

In a word yes. There's little need in most instances for lightning fast data storage. Keep the OS side of things lean and mean and fast. You could consider a dedicated partition for the page file but with the huge amounts of RAM in use VM is likely to be very seldom, if ever, utilised.

[Tracer9]

If you're gaming you'd probably be better off with a dual core over a quad core. I've read in several places that quad core, while it appears better, has lower performance, simply because games haven't been designed to take advantage of the 4 cores. Even recently, they're only starting to take advantage of 2 cores.
Similarly with running dual video cards, you don't really get a very big performance boost for what you're paying for. For a better price/performance ratio, it's usually better to just buy a single really good card.

And finally, your actual question, I've seen differing opinions on whether or not RAID 0 actually provides any benefit. In playing games, no, you won't likely see any benefit at all. But in loading times (like loading a map before the game) then you'll see a pretty big increase in performance. So if you care about getting onto the map 5 seconds before anyone else, then sure, RAID 0 will do it.
You'll have to weigh it against the risk of losing your data. RAID 0 stores the data across both hard drives, so if one drive fails, the data is split in half and can be hard to put back together.

If you don't care about the price and just want to build a huge system with big stats to show off, then go for it! If you're interested in getting the best performance/price ratio, I'm sure there are a lot of tweaks that could be recommended.

*If I'm wrong about anything above, someone please correct me; I'm always learning new things!

[Paul Komski]

across both hard drivesIts both if there are two drives in the array but all drives if there are three or more drives in the array.