Discuss: RAID 0 for gaming?

[dparm]

Fry's/Outpost recently had a killer deal on a Hitachi 160GB SATA-300 hard drive: $40 after rebate. I already have a 160GB SATA-300 drive in my XPS, so I figured I'd buy this second one and make a RAID 0 setup.

It's my understanding that RAID 0 improves disk access times but decreases reliability. Some members of the Dell XPS Community Forums were very adamant that RAID 0 will show no measurable improvement in gaming, and that I should stick with RAID 1 for redundancy.

Frankly I don't need redundancy on the XPS since it has nothing important on it, except for some save game files (which I drop on a flash drive once a week anyways).

So my quesiton is this: should I use these two drives in RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration?

[amccabe]

I was interrested in RAID 0 until I read some articles on hardware enthusiast sites with bechmarks to back-up their findings.

Using the software RAID controller on motherboards (as opposed to a hardware RAID), there is very little or no real world performance boost. Synthetic hard drive benchmarks always show substantial benefit, but application bechmarks show otherwise.

here is a really good article on Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2101

and a quote from the summary:

"If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop."

[dcv]

There really is no real need for fast disk access in gaming anyway - it'll improve load times between levels, but most everything (textures, engine, etc) gets stored in system and gpu memory.

[picch]

I use RAID 0 for my gaming rig (picked up a pair of HDs on sale @ newegg) and it improves does improve performance especially on games where the hard drive is stressed like crazy (ie Battlefield 2).

[dparm]

So is RAID 1 really just the better choice? Kinda annoyed that I ordered this drive and now it really won't be any faster, lol.

[dcv]

I'm a creepily paranoid, tinfoil-hat kinda guy, so I'd say go with RAID1 for the redundancy, as well as keeping an extra copy of your disk image on a NAS drive somewhere (I seriously have four backups of my important data - and one of them is in a different city).

If you've already ordered the drive, you may as well get some use out of it, and I'd say having a backup is a bigger benefit than a negligible increase in performance that will leave you high and dry if only one of your two drives fails.

[picch]

RAID 1 drops performance

[dcv]

RAID 1 only decreases write performance, not read (which can be assigned to one drive). For the purpose of having redundancy, I think that tradeoff is fair.

[dparm]

My drive gets here tomorrow. I'm going to run some real-world benchmarks on how long it takes to load games and such on the RAID 0 (I already took some measurements on the non-RAID setup).

Worse comes to worst, I'll just go RAID 1 and never worry about losing anything.

[dcv]

My drive gets here tomorrow. I'm going to run some real-world benchmarks on how long it takes to load games and such on the RAID 0 (I already took some measurements on the non-RAID setup).

Worse comes to worst, I'll just go RAID 1 and never worry about losing anything.

Let us know the results when you get them.

[powellm]

For what it's worth, RAID 0 cut the boot time on my desktop significantly.

[picch]

I'm hoping to pickup on another newegg sale and do a 1+0 setup to have the best of all worlds :)

[dparm]

Well the ICH7R AHCI/RAID controller I have supports RAID 10 (0+1), but you obviously need 4 drives to do that....I'll keep it in mind should NewEgg or whoever have a nice sale (and I figure out where to put them in the case, LOL).



Anyways, preliminary benchmarks using PC Wizard 2006:

Before: (Western Digital 160GB SATA2 w/NCQ)
Sequential write: 41.6 MB/sec
Sequential read: 51.13 MB/sec
Buffered write: 133.59 MB/sec
Buffered read: 165.28 MB/sec
Random read: 33 MB/sec

After: (Western Digital & Hitachi 160GB SATA2 w/NCQ drives, RAID-0)
Sequential write: 58.99 MB/sec
Sequential read: 91.92 MB/sec
Buffered write: 172.51 MB/sec
Buffered read: 193.25 MB/sec
Random read: 32 MB/sec


So according to the benchmarking software, I basically improved by a nice margin across the board:

Sequential write: +41.8%
Sequential read: +79.8%
Buffered write: +29.1%
Buffered read: +16.9%
Random read: -4%
Avg: +32.7%


Windows startup time is most definitely faster -- about twice as fast, no joke. I will start installing games and other applications tonight to get some real-world benchmarks.

For those interested, my motherboard has an Intel 945 chipset and the ICH7R Intel southbridge. Both drives are second-gen SATA with 8MB caches and 7200rpm rotational speeds. Both had their link speeds set to 3.0Gbps with Spread Spectrum Clocking enabled, and were hooked into motherboard slots 0 and 1. I installed the Intel Matrix Storage Manager 6.0 drivers and the latest drivers/firmwares for all my installed devices.


(FWIW, reinstalling Windows was a major headache. I realized I had no floppy drive in my XPS to even install the third-party RAID drivers. I first tried setting a USB flash drive up with DOS and making it bootable...but that won't work. In the process, I accidentally erased my external hard drive with over 50GB of backed up videos, photos, and school work. I was able to recover it, fortunately. I had to rip apart another computer of ours and install the floppy drive temporarily. When it came time to install Windows, I got conflicting information on which driver to load via F6. Finally figured out that you just need to have the floppy in the drive, you don't have to select the driver yourself with F6.....thanks Intel, Dell, and Dell support forums for all striking-out on that one!)

[picch]

Dan I was in the same boat as you were. I have no floppy drive and every other floppy drive in the house seemed to be dead, so I had to take it from best buy and shell out $20 for a floppy drive. SUCH A PAIN!

I can't remember if vista even supports anything besides floppy drives for loading raid drivers. I'll have to load up the vista disk and see

[jharriso]

It was something like that that prompted me to start slipstreaming the drivers of all the RAID controllers/etc that I need into my XP distro.
Woo customized!

[dparm]

I tried to slipstream it all.....problem is that XP MCE can't be slipstreamed very easily, even with something like HFSLIP. XP MCE is technically XP Pro with some networking stuff (mainly Active Directory) disabled, but with a bunch of add-ins. This makes slipstreaming tricky.

I did try the slipstream disc I made and found that it basically installs XP Pro (or so it thinks), and then I have to go and manually install the MCE additions.

Not worth it in my mind....I'll buy a cheap floppy drive.



I do want to say that RAID 0 gave a huge speed boost to Virtual PC (which is now free of course). Windows XP installs soooo much faster it isn't even funny. I don't have any benchmarks to show you, but believe me when I say that it isn't painfully slow.