Not really the spot to post this but I know alot of really smart people read this board. I am setting up a RAID on my new Win7 system. I haven't bought any hard drives yet. My question is which hard drives are fastest for gaming ect.. in raid setup AND the important question is.. I have a few options with my board. Stripe which is raid0, stripe/mirror, mirror/stripe, and Raid5. I think stripe/mirror is 01 and mirror/stripe is 10. Which would be the fastest setup for gaming? again I can buy 2-4 hard drives w/e is needed. Thanks
HDD options IMO go for 2 western digital raptors in raid0,or if you are loaded with cash the best option would be a solid state drive.
anyone else? I don't want to lose my data in case of one failure I was leaning towards raid5 is raid01 or raid10 better though?
You'd better go for RAID10 its a bit faster than RAID5 with reads but twice as fast as RAID5 with writes (RAID5 writes are slow due to parity clac.) As for HDD's, it depends on your budget. Low budget: go for WD Black (very good) Medium budget: go for WD Raptor High budget: go for SSD
Yeah SSD>Raptor. Honestly, I'll prolly get flamed for this but RAID0 is NOT worth the dataloss risk. A while back Anandtech ran some hard load numbers, fps, etc. using raid 0. The increases were MINIMAL at best with IIRC ALL of them having less than a second faster load time. FPS were essentially unaffected. Uless the CPU was being used to do some of the RAID calculations, in that case fps actually went down.
so my board settings don't have raid10. My options are Stripe which is Raid 0 and stripe/mirrored and mirrored/striped and raid 5 which is RAID10?
RAID10 or RAID1+0 is stripe of mirrored sets (RAID1, then RAID0) Create first Mirrored sets, then stripe them.
If you're going for 4 disks, there is no difference in performance, just rebuilding performance in case of failure is better with RAID10 than RAID01.
so for gaming I should go 4 disks as raid 1+0 which is what on an asus board stripe/mirror or mirror/stripe or raid5 those are my 3 settings availible
I won't be of any help here, I don't know about your mobo. Try to figure it out, but if it's labeled like stripped mirror (means 10) or mirrored stripe (means 01), it's clear. (RAID5 is RAID5) Anyway, it won't make that difference, go for any.
Cool I got striped mirroring. Now I have to figure out hwo to partition them using this nvidia array tool. Thanks wolfdale you have been much help
RAID is not going to do anything to improve FPS in games. If you are looking for large amounts of data storage and speed go with RAID 10. Otherwise go with a SSD for your OS Drive and a WD Raptors in RAID 1 for your storage drive.