P1Fanatic

My secondary drive went bang the other day. Luckily all important stuff backed up on DVD-R. If I buy a new drive I may as well use it as primary and install a fresh copy of XP. Now I was looking at a 300gb SATA drive for around £40 and remembered I have a RAID controller on my motherboard. So a few questions:

1. Is there really a notable performance difference using a built in RAID controller (Asus A8N-SLI mobo) e.g. when loading up games like HL2/CS:Source?
2. When you configure RAID do you get 1 logical drive (for arguments sake C so you can then partition it as you please?

For an extra £40 it seems worth it just to play around and also to have a real time backup of my primary hard drive.

Cheers,
Simon

P.S. Does anyone recommend any (preferably free) ghosting software thats easy to use?

mike1210

should make one drive out of the drives you have, not sure about performance wise mind using the built in controller.

Windows backup is free and can backup files without issues (with XP Pro only)

something else to look at which is excellent

http://www.acronis.com/promo/ATI/tru...FQqHlAodZnQm-Q

i use that to backup files to a lacie drive then disconnect the drive once done

HankScorpio

Yuo can usually go two ways with RAID and two disks...

Mirroring (Raid1) where data is written to both disks simultaneously and they "mirror" each other so if one fails, you're still working. This will be presented to the system as one large disk of the size of one of the drives for you to partition how you like.

Striping (RAID0) is where half the data is in effect written to each disk "striping" it across the disks. In theory, this can give a performance boost as you're using two channels to write the data rather than one but whether you notice it is another matter! This is again presented to the system as one physical drive for you to partition as you like but this time the capacity is that of both disks added together.

So striping gets you faster (maybe) and more space, but no fault tolerance.

Depends what's important to you...

HankScorpio

Oh, and if you lose one disk in a stripe set, you loose ALL your data...

P1Fanatic

Thanks for the replies guys. Not so appealing now as only the one benefit per setup. Still as drives are cheap may give it a go just to tinker around.

Cheers,
Simon

BlkKnight

Gaming wise, the gains aren't that great.

yes your load times will be less, but the actual FPS inside the game won't change.


Better to spend the money getting a bigger faster single disk. IMHO

P1Fanatic

I was originally thinking of getting a 74gb Raptor for my main drive but pricey at £90. If using such a drive would it be beneficial to use it purely for installing games or would installing both your OS and games on it provide better performance (as when loading / playing a game the OS is obviously running behind it)?

Simon

EddScott

I was told that the raptors are quite loud when accessing. I bought 2 150GB baracudas instead and put them in RAID1 - this was for work. Plus we have DVD back up offsite every Friday - it gets as far as my cars glove box

For home, the only stuff I worry about losing is my save-games and **** - thats all backed up on an external and internal - no RAID.

If theres no FPS drop then I might set my home PC up for RAID1. RAID0 I don't like the sound of if you lose everything if one goes down.

mike1210

Program files and OS on RAID0, normal files on normal HD or RAID with redundancy i.e RAID 1,5,6,10 etc, maybe a little overkill for home use mind

I've toyed with the idea of RAID at home for redundancy but at the end of the day it only provides hardware redundancy which is great for businesses and the like, but on RAID1 for example, delete a file by mistake... gets replicated....file is lost on both drives.

To be sure its as you said, redundancy with RAID and external backups

I Belive hardcore gamers like two Raptors in RAID0 for loading times and the like

dunx

iTrader: (3)

Read in CustomPC that the 500 Gb Samsung was as fast as a Raptor, and half the price, so I got two....

Two more and I can stripe and mirror, LOL....

Dunx

HankScorpio

If your board can support it, RAID5 is the way to go but you need at least three disks.