Will I notice a difference w/Raid 0?

[secretagent558]

I use my computer primarily for gaming, but once in a while I'll do some video and photo editing. I was wondering if it would be worth upgrading to a Raid 0 configuration. I have a Maxtor 80gb hard drive (7200rpm, 8mb cache) and if I went this route, I would buy the same for the 2nd drive. My motherboard has built in Raid and 80gb is enough space for me now. Will I notice any difference in game load times, system start up time, and transferring of files, etc? Thanks!

[bailey]

running a raid 0 set up will give you any more noticeable performance increase, as the read/write operations are striped across both drives.

[TwoRails]

I'm not a big fan of RAID for "home" use. First, there is a bigger risk, as if you loose one drive you in essence loose both, data wise. But, with video editing, modern PATA / SATA drives are plenty fast and are not the bottle neck; processing power is. I say this as when your rendering a movie, the CPU will be at 100%, but the hard drive light is still just blinking, not even coming close to running solid. More HD room would be more useful.

[secretagent558]

I'm not worried about losing data, I don't have anything that's not on a CD already. Thanks for the replies.

[spyder003]

Don't bother with it, get yourself a 74GB Raptor if you want something fast to run games from. RAID 0 is a fad right now.

[glc]

Run RAID 0 if you want to and you don't care about possible data loss. The benchmarks will be noticeably faster. Is it worth it? In my opinion, no. A single Raptor or NCQ SATA drive should give you as much of a speed increase as a pair of PATA drives in RAID 0. Again, in my opinion, the only RAID worth running is RAID 5.

[secretagent558]

I was looking at the Raptor, and it was over $180, and I could get another Maxtor for $70 so that was another reason I was looking at a Raid 0 setup.

[glc]

For $72 you can get an 80 gig Seagate NCQ drive.

[secretagent558]

If this article is true then maybe I'll just grab one of those drives.

http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,1121,2102,00.html

[TwoRails]

My understanding is that the mobo has to support NCQ to gain any advantage.

[secretagent558]

I was just going to ask that question. Do only newer boards support NCQ?

I also found this webpage:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

I think I'll just forget Raid 0 for now. Maybe a smaller Raptor for the main drive and my current hard drive for saving stuff too.