Is this a good upgrade?

[Preacher]

Here my current system specs:

Core II Duo E6300
Gigabye S2 Mother board
Corsair 1GB 667 Single channel 5-5-5-15
Sapphire Radeon X1900XT 512MB
Western Digital 80GB IDE 7200RPM
Seagate 80GB S-ATA 2 7200RPM
Lite-On DVD/CD-RW Optical Drive
Enermax Noisetaker II 420W

Ok well, i have 1k shekels for my birthday
i think i am going to buy an identical HD so i can go to raid 0 and add another 1gb for crysis . What do u guys think?

Thanks
Preacher

 

[Trotter]

Sounds good.

 

[Preacher]

Wow fast reply thanks, will this be good enough for the dx9 version of crysis? on 1280 x 1024 high settings?

 

[Nukem]

by all means... it'll be good enough for a lot of games

 

[Preacher]

OK, cool what are the advantages of raid 0? lol im not doing my homework

 

[baronvongogo]

I wouldn't mess around with raid unless you have researched plenty and know exactly what to do.

 

[Meithan]

In RAID0, two identical HDDs "share" files. The HDDs are combined into a single logical drive. Every time you write a file to that unit, the RAID0 controller divides it into small pieces ("striping") and distributes the pieces over both physical drives.

What's the advantage? When you want to read that file back, both HDDs will be put into operation and read the pieces they each have. The result is that the file will get read faster (because you have two disks working at once).

What's the catch? If either disk fails, then the information stored on both will be corrupted, because without the pieces in both disks, the file cannot be reconstructed.

Is it worth it? In my opinion based on what I've read, the performance gain is not as large as you'd think (you don't get twice the read speed). Secondly, the price of having two small identical HDDs is usually much higher than buying a single HDD with the combined capacity (for example, look up the price of two 100GBs disk vs a single 200GBs HDD). Thirdly, your data will be a little less secure, since if one disk fails, all your data is compromised.

My opinion: RAID0 is not worth it.

 

[BennyV04988]

Meithan, RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. When you get into the larger devices like 250s and 320s, then it makes sense if you need more storage. a 500GB HDD is like $180, where two 250s are $150. It really only makes sense to do it when the price of one surpases the price of two. The "performance gain" is extra, if anything. It's not worth actually spending money on the have.

 

[Meithan]

Meithan, RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

According to Wikipedia, that's what it originally meant. Nowadays it usually means Redundant Array of Independent Disks. RAID0 does not really qualify as "redundant", that's why it's RAID0.

When you get into the larger devices like 250s and 320s, then it makes sense if you need more storage. a 500GB HDD is like $180, where two 250s are $150. It really only makes sense to do it when the price of one surpasses the price of two.

Agreed. I was thinking based on Mexican prices. If buying two smaller HDDs is less expensive, then definitely go for it. But you could still just have them as separate logical units. RAID0 is not strictly necessary.

 

[Preacher]

well ill probably buy another HDD games are going to be 10GBs so.. ill have 160GB of sata 2 storage i dont want to use my crappy IDE i have in my PC , and i think i wont mess around with raid 0.
Thanks for the replies!

Preacher