raid performance?

[dario03]

I'm trying to decide between two different motherboards. One board has no raid and after MIR would cost $33 less. So I'm trying to decide if I want to spend the money on raid or not.

Basically I'm wondering if I would notice the difference with raid0 compared to no raid. I mainly use the speed aspect of my computer for gaming, some video incoding, and very very very little video editing.

 

[alexsabree]

Hmm.. you can get a raid chip for around $30 on newegg. So I wouldn't buy a motherboard based on if it had raid or not.

 

[synergy]

There is also the cost of having to buy TWO hard drives. The performance increase is nice, but not entirely noticable.

 

[dario03]

I need a new hard drive anyways. Though if I don't raid I'll probably get a 500gb compared to another 320gb.

 

[Invisible]

i was at my friends house when the ups guy brought my friend his second HDD and we installed RAID 0, i definatly noticed the difference, worth it if you ever need more space to set up

 

[macdawg]

the newer seagate drives with 16 or especially 32mb cache should offer close performance to some raid 0 configurations, appears to be plenty fast for 99.9% of gamers and have very close loading times without having the increased noise, heat, risk, and extra power consumption from an extra drive.

boot time goes up a few seconds but is for the most part negated by extra post time by the raid controller.

I bet your just as well off or better just getting something like this IMO

Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3250310NS 250GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

 

[dario03]

Ok but what if I raided 2 Seagate 7200.11 32mb cache hard drives. Is there a performance gain?

 

[synergy]

There are so many factors involved: drivers, size of disks in relation to data on the disk, rotation speeds, etc.

To directly answer your question RAID helps, but if you are looking for an amazing increase in performance look at getting more RAM or something.