Raid 0

[forizzle111]

I have one 100GB sata and my motherboard has a built in RAID controller, Im thinking about adding another 100GB sata and setting up a RAID 0 configuration. i know all about RAID except how much it really speeds things up. so how much faster would my read/write times be? like it takes me about 30 sec. for windows to load so. thanks

[doctorgonzo]

If the only reason you want to do it is to speed up Windows, don't. With RAID 0, if one of the drives goes bad, you lose all the data on both drives. The risk of data loss really isn't worth it except in a few circumstances.

[forizzle111]

im not worried about losing data. just need speed, gaming and 3D stuff

[doctorgonzo]

You will see nowhere near a 100% increase in performance. Most likely, you will shave a few seconds off of the load times. If you look at real-world performance as opposed to synthetic benchmarks, RAID 0 isn't usually worth it. However, you will definitely see a 100% increase in the likelihood of losing all your data. If you do decide to go with RAID 0, make sure you back up your data regularly.

[rspassey]

I don't recomend it as there is too much risk for total data loss. - if you want to speed things up, get another 100GB drive and which is faster or has a larger cache.

To speed up windows load times go into msconfig and remove start up items which aren't needed. Use www.sysinfo.org to verify which are needed and which aren't.
Frequent defrags and diskclean ups can help a bit too.

[glc]

You are going to get a heck of a lot better improvement in your games and 3D stuff if you get a better video card - your hard drive system is not your bottleneck there.