Raid question

[mark2005]

would i simple raid setup with a couple of wd raptors help with gaming??


Gigabyte P67 UD4 B3

4 GB Gskill Ripjaw 1600 1.5v

Evga 570 GTX SC

Thermaltake 850 watt Power supply

Cretaive x fi extreme gamer

500 gb wd hd

windows 7 64bit ultimate

[Acebmxer]

Re: Raid question

The only thing Raid is going to do for game is alow it to load quicker. Start up time will be faster and if the game needes to load a new zone or what ever.. You might see 1-3 fps if you even see that at all.

[nfanis]

Re: Raid question

get any modern SSD drive for your games and you l see major difference on loading screens etc. For FPS Depends on the game and basically the amount of RAM you have. If your game needs to access alot your HDD cause of low RAM you l definitely see improvement to FPS as well.

[wazza300]

Re: Raid question

I'd say price per gb,you can't beat a mechanical hdd,a 1tb or 2tb is fine for gaming,the size of games would soon fill up an ssd,I'm usually the first or second person in the game server when it loads to the next level so I don't think you would see much improvement in a raid setup,plus you'd have to worry about reliability with raid

[Acebmxer]

Re: Raid question

I agree with wazza just get 2 WD black hdd's set to raid 0 and call it a day. If you want os on raid get the WD 500gb black drives either sata2 or sata3.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Raid question

SSD is what you really should look at, a decent one too otherwise if you buy a cheap one it would be the same as buying hard drives (So if you can't afford SSD, then ya, look at a pair of WD blacks instead)

I'm with Acebmxer here, go with two WD black 500GB, don't go larger as those are usually slower due to the multiple platters used.

[Judge-dredd]

Re: Raid question

Raid is better i think for gaming go with the WD raptor or Western Digital RE4 the RE4 drive are made for raid even RE3 are good put two four are six of this together for great speed the more drive fast it is
as for reliability as someone posted above in the 12 years i have been biulding my own machine and 10 years useing raid i have never had a hard drive to fail I am not saying it cant happen but if you take care of drive keep it defagment it should not fail
I use diskeeper on my for the last 8 years for me best program there is for keeping hard drive clean

[nfanis]

Re: Raid question

I tested world of warcraft on my raid 0 intel 320 ssd (2x 320disks 80gb) and in my raid 0 array of 4 velociraptors 300gb. On SSD loading screens were much faster than mechanical drive array and on some points at 25man raiding and on battlegrounds i feeled the game much smoother while running on ssd than on the hdd. On FPS Games like Crysis 2 it was totally the same tho

[Psycho101]

[wazza300]

[Psycho101]

Re: Raid question

It's good value, but the platter density won't quite make up for it only spinning at 5400 RPM. If OP really wants a 2TB drive, it's not a bad choice.

F3 7200RPM: http://extreme.pcgameshardware.de/at...ng_hd103sj.png

F4 5400RPM: http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/2...2tbhdtune3.png

Doesn't seem like much, but when the drives are hammered with loading/unpacking the many small files they'll need to loading game levels, the extra seek time on the F4 will bring it down some. It's access time/seek time that will seperate the two, which is why a spinning disk RAID array wouldn't be much of an advantage.