Raid 0 with HDDs (gaming)

[R4DIO4CT1VE]

I know SSD is easier, but i have 4 HDDs just laying around and i was wondering if there was any significant performance gain when using raid 0 versus single drive in gaming. Data safety is not an issue, no sensitive data will be stored on the drive(s). I realize that it will not affect FPS only loading times.

 

[boosted1g]

Faster hard drives will in no way increase FPS.
The game itself will load faster and if the game has locally stored maps then that will be faster.

RAID 0 also comes with a lot of cost. Since the data is split across the multiple drives it only takes one drive to fail or have bad sectors for ALL the data to be lost.

 

[techgeek]

If data security isn't an issue, then you should experience shorter loading times if the load times are limited by storage performance. In some games it's not actually storage throughput that slows the load times, in some games the textures are heavily compressed and need to be decompressed before being loaded into the VRAM which makes it CPU intensive.

I'd say if you have 4 identical HDD's just lying around, it's certainly not going to hurt anything.

 

[giantbucket]

why not, run it if you want to. you can always re-install the games anyways. the nice thing about RAID0 or RAID5 is that the drives tend to always be spinning, so there's no lag when you pause and then resume an action (at least that's what i'm seeing on video playback)

i thought about this RAID0 thing and "just one drive needs to fail" - but the same is true of one platter on a 4-platter single drive. once that platter fails, a bunch of data is hosed anyways. or one fuse on the board, or one chip, whatever.

if you have 4 drives, i'd think about a RAID5 though. slow to write but fast to read and at least some resiliency.