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Raid 0 is slower than no raid?!?

Black Panther

Black Panther

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Now I'm not one who believes all that I read posted on the net, but I came across this on another forum:

The Urban Legends about RAID drives are just so much pie in the sky when it's games that are involved. RAID1 and RAID5 are great for creating an automatic, continuous backup, but RAID0 simply has too much builtin overhead that unless the files it deals with are truly HUGE, there is no speed advantage. There is in fact a performance HIT from RAID0.

Anand Tech ran exhaustive tests several years ago, and found RAID0 slower on all of the games they benchmarked.
Click to expand...

I think this is mistaken?
If yes I want to correct him at least for the sake of not misinforming people who are not so tech-y on this gaming forum.
And well, if he's correct... why on earth do guys put drives in Raid0 array?
 
mmmmm....i dont think so...
 
That's what I thought as well, but this article appears to have different views.
:confused:
 
Not constantly, at the start of each level or so everything is loaded into ram.
 
That article from anand was years ago, when onboard raid SUCKED.

The newer controllers are much better, and there are real world advantages.

It wont affect anything in game, but will always have faster load times.
 
Xfire is correct. The data is pulled from the harddrives and loaded into the RAM for gaming. Only sent back to the hard drive when saving a game or loading a new level. you will notice the speed and performance when doing something like installing a huge software program like Reason, Photoshop or premier pro. Having a RAID 0 setup for Photoshop, flash or Premier pro is a must!! speaking from expericence!!
 
Grimskull said:
Xfire is correct. The data is pulled from the harddrives and loaded into the RAM for gaming. Only sent back to the hard drive when saving a game or loading a new level. you will notice the speed and performance when doing something like installing a huge software program like Reason, Photoshop or premier pro. Having a RAID 0 setup for Photoshop, flash or Premier pro is a must!! speaking from expericence!!
Click to expand...

Yeah but you also have to remember, Windows uses both virtual memory and RAM. So if its using at least part of v memory when loading the game into RAM/v memory, its using the hard drive, and a faster hard drive will ofc be better :D.

This doesnt affect people who turn pagefile off though, ie me :) (Then I use 85% of 4GB when in photoshop :p)
 
Black Panther said:
That's what I thought as well, but this article appears to have different views.
:confused:
Click to expand...

No, that article is saying that Anand and Storage Review are mistaken. Those two were either not using benchmarks that put an actual load on the hard drive (both of them), or were limiting the performance of the RAID array by using a PCI controller card instead of a much faster PCI-X or PCIe controller card (Storage Review).

You also have to realize how old those reviews are. The Anand review was done on a now anchient ICHR5 on-board controller. Far inferior to today's offerings. These reviews were from 2004, yet Storage Review was using tests from 2002 that didn't even fully tax the storage system when they released, let alone 2 years later.

Read the entire article you linked, and you'll see that there are definitely gains to be had.

I can also tell you from first hand experience, that RAID0 is faster at most things. Especially anything involving transferring large files.
 
Pinchy said:
That article from anand was years ago, when onboard raid SUCKED.

The newer controllers are much better, and there are real world advantages.

It wont affect anything in game, but will always have faster load times.
Click to expand...

Where is the article? ie how do you know they used onboard RAID?
 
also they might have being using SATA 1.5 drives.... just an after thaught.

85% of 4GB RAM for photshop sounds interesting *strokes chin*

When i get my new rig up and running i'll let you know what the story is then!
 
yeah that must be an old article, back when the onboard controllers suxd. I used to have raid on my old gaming machine and bf2 loaded WAY faster than on a single drive.. it was quite a big difference from what I remember.
 
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.
 
RAID 0 benefits gaming. Make sure the volume is properly defragmented.
 
DanTheBanjoman said:
It only affects loading times, it won't increase FPS or anything. So gaming itself isn't affected.
Click to expand...

Loading time is part of gaming. Maps and other resources loading faster during online gameplay or during a LAN is a boon, a zippy progress-bar is flaunt-worthy too. On the other hand the CPU overhead could slightly affect FPS (frames/second) in massive world environments such as in say Battlefield 2 where resources are streamed as the player goes around a huge world/map.
 
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DanTheBanjoman said:
It only affects loading times, it won't increase FPS or anything. So gaming itself isn't affected.
Click to expand...

Its true and not true. True - FPS won't increase or there won't be any difference, may be 1 or 2 FPS because of faster loading page files.
Not True - Even though not much difference in FPS the load times between levels say BF2 is much faster, the faster you get in the more chance of getting into a APV, Armor, FAV etc which will give you more kills.

There is difference between generations of Onboard Raid controllers. On NForce2 Socket A board raid sucked, it will be better off with single drive. On Nforce3 ultra 2 fold increase in performance compared to NForce2. But now I using Raid on my new ECS GF8200A and I see vast improvement in load times. Thats because NFroce3 only supported Sata I and the controller's thru put is not that great.

Raid 0 will give over all performance boost in wide variety of apps including games.
 
RAID and its CPU overhead could mar FPS, not improve it....unless it's a $500 RAID card that's driving the disks.
 
DanTheBanjoman said:
It only affects loading times, it won't increase FPS or anything. So gaming itself isn't affected.
Click to expand...

I'm of the opinion that it depends on the game.

Sure, playing Battlefield 2 probably won't benefit much from a faster drive. But the game I play most is Oblivion and I've got a few GBs of mods that I play. When I used a RAID setup, there was a definite improvement. I'd say I gained about 5-10 fps (My system was doing about 20 - 30 fps before, and 25 - 40 fps after).

It's also going to depend on the drives you use. If you're already using Raptors, you may not see a large jump in using two in RAID0. But if you're using something that only gives 40MB/s read, then you RAID0 a couple (because you've got them sitting around), the difference is going to be more noticeable.

It all depends on where your bottleneck is for that program. If you've got 1GB of memory, then you're using your discs more. If you've got 4GB, then the difference will be less.


There's no way someone can just say that "RAID0 doesn't benefit gamers".

I'd be willing to say that RAID0 affects gamers that have a HDD bottleneck.
 
can anny one tell me what teh differends is in raid0 1 2 3 4 5 ?
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Most popular are RAID 0,1,5

All others are exotic or have specialized applications. RAID 10 or 0+1 is probably the next most, although you need 4 drives with only the space of two. But you get excellent coverages with performance as well.
 
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