Sata worth it? Raid 0 ?

[ricbrooks2]

The pc I just built I did not go with a SATA drive and now I am regretting it. Is the speed worth it to go SATA? I was thinking of getting a 74G Raptor and running SATA or even buying two and setting up RAID-0. My main goal is to get this thing fast and I want to upgrade but only if I can notice the difference in speed. I will be doing this to the rig in my signature so please help those that have done this. I have read a lot about the RAID set ups and Raptors I just want to know peoples opinions.

[doctorgonzo]

Do you just want to make it go fast for the sake of going fast, or do you engage in activities (like video editing) that would make it worthwhile for the drives to be faster?

If you don't need the speed, don't go RAID 0. It increases the chance that you will lose all your data (if one of the drives fails, you lose everything on both drives), so it isn't worth it except for very particular circumstances. Getting a Raptor, with its faster spindle speed, is a safter alternative than setting up RAID.

There really isn't much speed difference between SATA and IDE drives. The bandwidth available on both far exceeds the maximum sustained data throughput of the drives themselves; the interface is not the bottleneck, the drive itself is.

[ricbrooks2]

Thank you for your reply but I must admit that is not what I expected. Most forums seems to indicate SATA is faster but RAID is not faster than SATA or not noticeably. Of cousre that is what I was asking for a real world opinion. The machine is a gamer an that is prmarily what I do play games listen to music or watch DVD's I do some copying of music but that's about it. The gaming is what I am targeting I just really want everything to be as fast as possible in all applications. Thank you again for your input

[doctorgonzo]

RAID 0 is definitely faster than just one drive, whether it is SATA or PATA; I wonder where you are hearing differently. SATA has a higher maximum bandwidth than PATA, but like I said, that bandwidth is not close to being entirely used by the disk. RAID 0 is faster simply because two disks are being read from simultaneously, which common sense tells you will be faster than one disk being read.

You really aren't going to see much performance increase in games by switching to a faster hard drive. Hard drive speed has little, if anything, to do with frame rates. If you go with a Raptor drive it will probably take a bit less time to load the game, but that's about it.