RAID 0 Options

[=FaRT= skutaboy]

I'm running low on space on my 160gb hard drive because I messed it up. (Unallocated space, blah blah blah), I have heard about RAID 0 being a better set up for PC performance and wondered if there is any significant advantage in gaming with this set up.

If its a good move, what componants would you opt for? I would like at least 250gb but 2 x 250gb hard drives would give me 500gb right?

Thanks,

skuta.

[MonkeyFiend]

well for raid 0 (striping) to work you'll need 2 disks, preferably of the same type and speed (e.g. 2x150gb Western Digital Raptors or some 10k cheetahs)

Striping works by reading/writing a section (stripe) of data to the first disk and some to the second disk at the same time. This makes things faster as a computer is basically using two disks to simultaneously read/write to.

This means that loading info from disk is faster - however not while this may reduce your game loading times, most games store as much info in real memory. So having faster disks won't improve the gameplay itself - it would probably reduce your loading times slightly.

The other consideration of striping the lack of redundancy. On a standard single disk, if it break you lose everything. With Raid 0 if EITHER disk breaks then it renders the system unuseable. The other types of raid have data redundancy but tis basically means buying additional disk - not really worth it.

Basically if you've money to burn then Raid 0 will improve performance at the cost of fault tolerance. (so make backups!)

Due to work and paranoia, I have a Raid 1 array (mirrored)