RAID 0 Test for it?

[SpikiestDog2]

I have set up a new raid 0 with 2 SATAII 16MB cach 250GB drives. However, it does not seem to have increased the PC performance over an IDE 7200 drive. I have gone into the BIOS and set it up partitioned, everything done correctly. I just don't see a performance increase. Any way to test the system?

Thanks

[glc]

Just goes to prove what I've been saying all along - RAID is unnecessary.

[kstatefan40]

Chances are, the only performance difference you will notice is the transition from IDE to SATA. I don't know of any tools to test RAID configurations, but I think the percent increase in marginal even if set up in an optimized configuration (servers).

[Panama Red]

Don't know how accurate the test is but PCPitstop has a system scan that includes hard drive performance. I'm not sure if it sees a Raid 0 as one drive or two. If you use it, let us know the results.

[SpikiestDog2]

PCPitStop said my raid "drive" is opperating at twice the uncached speed as my IDE drives. That is weird, I thought there would be less time to wait for Windows to start up. Oh well. Thanks for the help.

[doctorgonzo]

RAID 0 provides very limited benefits unless you are doing something that really taxes hard drive bandwidth, such as audio or video editing. If you aren't doing that, then RAID 0 is an unwarranted risk.

[glc]

Time to post this link again:

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

I quote from the conclusions:

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.

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.