Raid 0 Vs no raid at all?

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jorn978

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So, I'm building a new PC and and i have 3 heavily used 750gb sata hds ( i think about 7600 rpm in case your wondering) In my new build i was thinking of running the 3 in Raid 0, but is it worth it? Could someone tell me the benefits?

Thanks ahead of time (and sorry if someone made a post like this before i couldn't find anything about it :/)
 
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geofelt
Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most desktop users.
The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates. It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
There are some apps that will benefit. They ar characterized by reading large files in a sequential manner.

Go test it out if you can.
But do not use synthetic benchmarks, do a test with your own apps.
I doubt you will notice any benefit.
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Hmm these days I find the benefits of RAID 0 to be less and less. The only benefit you would get would probably be more writes, and slightly faster reads.

Basically with 3 HDD's in RAID 0 (RAID 0 is for performance, RAID 1 is for data redundancy/protection) you will have 3x the chance one of your drives will fail and completely mess up your RAID.

I would suggest keeping them all seperate. That way - if you lose 1 HDD, you don't lose everything (which is the case with RAID 0).
 
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Yeah, RAID is over rated with today's faster drives. Years ago, when drives were slow as molasses in January, RAID 0 made a huge impact on performance. If you put the drives into RAID0 and you have an issue with any of them, you will lose everything on the drives, with no hope of recovery.

My advice? Don't do it. But if you must, just to see for your self if it is worth it, put 2 of them in RAID 0 and use the 3rd to back what you have on the RAID array so you will have your stuff when the array goes tits up.
 
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Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most desktop users.
The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates. It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
There are some apps that will benefit. They ar characterized by reading large files in a sequential manner.

Go test it out if you can.
But do not use synthetic benchmarks, do a test with your own apps.
I doubt you will notice any benefit.
 
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Solution
Thanks everyone for the quick replies, and really im not looking to make windows a whole lot faster or anything ( I already have these hds laying around so i thought i may as well put them to good use) Im mostly just looking to see if the raid 0 config will make things install faster, videos run faster (its a far shot but hey), or even make games run faster.
I think i actually say a benchmark somewhere that said an ssd made crysis's minimum fps raise by about 10 fps
 
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I would look with skepticism on a claim that a SSD will add fps to any game. Level load times might get better.
Perhaps the user had insufficient ram and a ssd improved paging performance.

Regardless, I heartily endorse using a SSD for the os and some apps. 60-120gb should do it. Use your hard drives for storage and overflow.
A ssd excells at small random reads and writes. A taks that the os does lots of. It will make your pc feel much quicker.
 
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Disk access in HDDs is usually not sequential, and so is dominated by access times. RAID0 does nothing to improve access times.

Oddly, a recent article in Tom's IT Pro shows good scaling in 4K random writes for RAIDed SSDs. But that applies to SSDs, not HDDs.
 
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Hm.. well since i can't afford an ssd i guess ill follow your advice and just kinda test it out for myself and see if i see any improvement in speed, if not ill just go back to 3 single drives

Thanks everyone for all the answers but i guess this is something ill just have to test out for myself 😀
 
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