Raid 0 is slower than no raid?!?

[Wile E]

RAID also heavily benefits people that do a lot of multitasking. Encode a video, and fire up a game at the same time on a single drive vs a RAID0 array, and see the difference in loading times, RAID can handle more simultaneous I/O ops than a single drive can.

Will RAID benefit someone that only surfs the web and uses Word? No, it won't. But if you are a heavy multitasker, it makes itself noticeable really quickly.

 

[Pinchy]

Where is the article? ie how do you know they used onboard RAID?

Lol WileE beat me to it.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=4
Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz
Intel D875PBZ Motherboard
1GB DDR400 SDRAM


So the claim is that in the i875 days onboard RAID was a lot worse than now? I'd like to see some numbers on that. As I have my doubts there.

I never have actually owned a RAID system before my current one, but from what ive read in the forums and an article I think I saw like a year back, onboard RAID has vastly improved.

raid 0 is faster on data transfers and access, but it shows limited to no gains while gaming. I've always found a single raptor better for gaming.

Yer I dont get that. I havent used a raptor but how would it make games load faster :\? It can access data a lot faster but when it comes to copying game data into RAM the RAID array would be loads faster.

Will RAID benefit someone that only surfs the web and uses Word? No, it won't.

Yes it will!!!!! Their OS will load slightly faster ...

 

[Wile E]

Yes it will!!!!! Their OS will load slightly faster ...

lol. Yeah, but hardly worth the trouble and expense for the average user.

 

[niko084]

RAID and its CPU overhead could mar FPS, not improve it....unless it's a $500 RAID card that's driving the disks.

Exactly, unless you have a hardware raid controller with its own processor you are using a bit of your cpu to handle the raid.

Stripe is used in blocks, common is 64k off one drive then 64k off the next drive, it helps when loading, moving or writing files larger than that of the block size.

In a slow machine it can seriously hurt your performance if you are using a driver/software based raid controller.

As far as increasing average fps and such in a game, highly unlikely as stated by many of the knowledgeable people above.

Raid has its purposes but they are pretty much limited to servers and people who want specific things for specific reasons.

 

[xfire]

A simple explaination of RAID
RAID 0 - Its sort of like your SLI/x-fire setup where two HDD's are used as one(The data is split between the two) giving you twice the speed.
RAID 1 - This is for Data backup. You require two hard disks and both the hard disk contain the same data so if one fails the other still remains.
RAID 5 - This is like RAID 0 but each hard contains something called a parity block which can be used to restore data if the other hard disk fails.

 

[xvi]

RAID has it's place. I've found that raw transfer speed is greatly improved for me. This trickles down to application launches and the whatnot. Real life things like boot times aren't amazing, but neither is my nForce RAID controller (nForce3 chipset).

IMO, it all depends on the controller. Onboard RAID only exists because motherboard manufacturers saw a market for cheap RAID regardless of actual performance. Desktop customers are easily sold on the illusion of performance and/or bragging rights. I believe NCQ/TCQ has a bit of the same story. Like RAID, it's great for servers and not as great for desktop use. Also like RAID, it can be implemented cheaply and still helps somewhat in certain situations.

Real RAID controllers are going to cost $100 at the very least. That is where you see your performance gains. Put a server RAID controller in a desktop machine and you'll have the gains you're looking for.