Raid 1/0 help

[jessethebean]

I have ASUS P4P800SE, 2.0 oc 2.9, 1GB of PC2100, Raid 1/0 (1x80 GB, 2x120 GB, 1x160 GB all maxtor) 1x60 GB, 1x40 GB Extra HDs, 64MB Graphic Card, SB 5.1 Gamer Sound Card, 1xCDRW, 1xCDROM, 1XDVDROM, Win XP Pro

i set up a raid 1/0 on this system and i tested it here. i looked at my Uncached speed and its 5MB/s. it should be alot faster then that with a raid set up right? i need some help on it. :confused:


http://www.pcpitstop.com/techexpress.asp?id=NLNVLW3Y9WUSE41E

[EzyStvy]

Here's the punch line from a recent article that might depress you like it did me.

Are two drives better than one?
(from anandtech.com)

Final Words

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.

There are some exceptions, especially if you are running a particular application that itself benefits considerably from a striped array, and obviously, our comments do not apply to server-class IO of any sort. But for the vast majority of desktop users and gamers alike, save your money and stay away from RAID-0.

If you do insist on getting two drives, you are much better off putting them into a RAID-1 array to have a live backup of your data. The performance hit of RAID-1 is just as negligible as the performance gains of RAID-0, but the improvement in reliability is worthwhile...unless you're extremely unlucky and both of your drives die at the exact same time.

When Intel introduced ICH5, and now with ICH6, they effectively brought RAID to the mainstream, pushing many users finally to bite the bullet and buy two hard drives for "added performance". While we applaud Intel for bringing the technology to the mainstream, we'd caution users out there to think twice before buying two expensive Raptors or any other drive for performance reasons. Your system will most likely run just as fast with only one drive, but if you have the spare cash, a bit more reliability and peace of mind may be worth setting up a RAID-1 array.

Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=1

[jessethebean]

was the test done with hardware or software?

[glc]

If you want to run RAID 0/1, you really need FOUR identical hard drives. All RAID setups should use identical drives or you are essentially defeating the purpose.

If you must run RAID with what you have, put the pair of 120's into either 0 or 1, depending what you want, and run the rest of the drives as standalones.