Raid 0 or Raid 10 for Gaming / which HDDs to buy?

[Mad Dog 2112]

Just wondering which Raid setup to use for Gaming (Raid 0 or Raid 10)? I also would like to know which HDD's you would recommend? WD with 64meg cache VS ??. I would like to have a minimum of 500g of usable raid drive space between the drives. I am not looking at SSD drives atm...so let's kill that suggestion atm...thx..

Thanks in advance for your assistance.



btw...ths system specs would be;

CPU - Intel 2600 I7
MB - ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z LGA 1155 Intel Z68 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Extended ATX Intel Motherboard
RAM - Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 15000)
GPU - EVGA 03G-P3-1584-AR GeForce GTX 580 (Fermi) 3072MB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support
PSU - CORSAIR Professional Series HX1050 1050W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS SILVER Certified
CASE - COOLER MASTER HAF 932 Advanced RC-932-KKN5-GP Black Steel ATX Full Tower Compucase Case with USB 3.0

 

[tokencode]

RAID 0 nand RAID 10 will offer identical performance. RAID 10 makes it redudant. If it is strictly for gaming, go RAID 0 and get an additonal standalone drive to do images of the RAID 0 array nightly for protection. With this config you will get essentially the same speed and data protection as RAID 10 but only need 3 drives rather than 4. I would go with WD Blacks.

 

[natx808]

if you want 500 gigs and raid 0 or raid 10 then you want 250 gig drives. remember more spindles = more throughput.... i had a 5 drive system raid-0 that would boot to login prompt in 10 seconds.

if you can afford it go raid 10 (requires 4 250GB drives) because it offers the peice of mind that in case a drive fails your system will still be running, warranty replace the failed drive and pop it back in and do an online rebuild.

if a drive dies in your raid 0 array, your data is gone and you have to a) replace the failed drive, b) reinitialize the raid-0 stripe, c) restore your data from backup

if you have to go with raid-0 you beter have a an extra drive that you are running daily backups to just in case, which needs to probably be 750gigs - 1TB to handle the full backup + incrementals

i have had sooo many drives go bad over the years, raid-0 is risky. of course just recently i was running 3 500GB raid 0

 

[Mad Dog 2112]

Thanks Tekkencode and natx808 for your replies.

Sounds like I better go with the Raid 10 set up to be safe!

The Drive which I am considering is:

Western Digital Caviar Black WD7502AAEX 750GB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136794
64.99 each x 4 (although I will buy 5x to be safe )

If there is another drive you guys could recommend or perhaps this WD Black listed above is not worthy, please let me know as intend to buy this complete set up tomorrow.

Thanks again for all your help

 

[tokencode]

One suggestion, buy a different backup drive. The likelyhood of them failing at the at similiar time will be less if your backup is a different type of drive, different model, lot etc.

 

[Mad Dog 2112]

Best answer selected by Mad Dog 2112.