Raid 0 or Seperate Hard Drives??

[Lucky_Penguin]

Hey guys and gals
I just recently purchased two wd Raptors 74gb at 10,000 RPM.
But im trying to decide on how I want to set them up.
Im a big gamer and also I do alot of computer graphics
as in alot of photoshop, 3DsMax, aftereffects, illustrator
etc. I have been debating or not if I want to do the whole
raid 0 thing or if I should put windows xp pro and all of
my computer graphics programs on the first hard drive
and all of my games on the second hard drive. I have
searched through alot of the RAID topics on this forum
but have not really found an answer to this. I know raid 0
is fast, but is there benefits to keeping them seperate and
having the OS on one and all your games on the second?
Or should I go with a RAID 0 setup?
I know with RAID 0, if one hard drive goes bad you loose
all of your data, but backup is not really a big deal with my
internals because I have a 250gb external that I put all
of my important files on.
If you need to know about my computer setup it is in my Signature.
BTW, I have also googled this question and have not
found an answer.
Thanks for the info ahead of time!

 

[Him]

RAID 0, you will get mych better performance. Since you are a huge gamer, this would be your best bet. In theory, since you have two drives acting as one, you would get twice the performance. Like you said, if one fails, they both are messed. But they are new, Raptors no less, very high quality stuff. So you dont have to worry about one or both failing on you, since they are new and you are not running a server that has huge hdd activity at almost all points of the day.

RAID 0, and drive fails shouldnt be of any worry to you.

 

[Wayniac]

Since we're on this topic, I was also kind of wondering the same thing, but I was worried about one of the drives failing... after all, twice the drives working means twice the chance of failure. My question is this. What is the most reliable company that I can trust to build a good drive that will not fail or goof on me?

 

[Chankama]

In theory, since you have two drives acting as one, you would get twice the performance.

This is true sometimes but not other times man .. Even "in theory".. When a new request comes in, you have to account for the probability of it requesting info from the HDD that is already processing stuff. Then that goes into the probability of the 1st HDD actually "doing" something at any given time.. And before u know it, when trying to setup the equations, your head will explode and you will die.

So the moral of this: trust the benchmark. lol

But, yeah. The "maximum" throughput "ever" possible is 2x the throughput of a single drive. But the theoretical throughout should be lower as it accounts for all time in probabilistic terms. .

What is the most reliable company

Seagate is great for 7200 rpm drives. And the Raptors are of course by WD ..

 

[Wayniac]

I already have a Western Digital... I was just wondering if I should get 2 new hard drives to RAID or just another Western Digital really.

 

[MrBebop26]

Raid 0 all the way, loading times are cut in half.

-Ryan

 

[dhw200]

I honestly cant say ive ever had a hard drive fail on me. I have mainly used western digitals.

 

[digitaloracle]

If your case and wallet are big enough, buy a third HD and use that for your files and such.

 

[AB0]

Dont use the Raptors in RAID 0. They were not made for it. There are a lot of reports of people using them in RAID 0 and having them fail after several months. Get Caviar REs (RAID Edition) instead. They are made to run in a RAID setup.

 

[Lucky_Penguin]

Well what about defrag problems with games, wouldnt it be cleaner to have the OS and apps on one hard drive and games on the other?
And wouldnt things run more efficently if the OS had its own hard drive??