I have never seen RAID 0 deliver anything "on the desktop". It has its place when handling large bdatabases and other specialized wporkstation scenarios like video editing, but nada for the gamer and typical user. This is a very old post I made many years ago ... every 2 or 3 years i give RAID it another shot and every time, I broke the arrays.
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http://faq.storagereview.com/SingleDriveVsRaid0
SR Gaming DriveMark 2002 Single Drive = 519 IO/sec RAID 0 = 529 IO/sec
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2101
"We were hoping to see some sort of performance increase in the game loading tests, but the RAID array didn't give us that. While the scores put the RAID-0 array slightly slower than the single drive Raptor II, you should also remember that these scores are timed by hand and thus, we're dealing within normal variations in the "benchmark".
Our Unreal Tournament 2004 test uses the full version of the game and leaves all settings on defaults. After launching the game, we select Instant Action from the menu, choose Assault mode and select the Robot Factory level. The stop watch timer is started right after the Play button is clicked, and stopped when the loading screen disappears. The test is repeated three times with the final score reported being an average of the three. In order to avoid the effects of caching, we reboot between runs. All times are reported in seconds; lower scores, obviously, being better. In Unreal Tournament, we're left with exactly no performance improvement, thanks to RAID-0
If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.
Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_0#RAID_0
RAID 0 is useful for setups such as large read-only NFS servers where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.
RAID 0 is also used in some gaming systems where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important. However, real-world tests with games have shown that RAID-0 performance gains are minimal, although some desktop applications will benefit.[1][2]
http://www.techwarelabs.com/articles/hardware/raid-and-gaming/index_6.shtml
".....we did not see an increase in FPS through its use. Load times for levels and games was significantly reduced utilizing the Raid controller and array. As we stated we do not expect that the majority of gamers are willing to purchase greater than 4 drives and a controller for this kind of setup. While onboard Raid is an option available to many users you should be aware that using onboard Raid will mean the consumption of CPU time for this task and thus a reduction in performance that may actually lead to worse FPS. An add-on controller will always be the best option until they integrate discreet Raid controllers with their own memory into consumer level motherboards."
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1001325
However, many have tried to justify/overlook those shortcomings by simply saying "It's faster." Anyone who does this is wrong, wasting their money, and buying into hype. Nothing more.
http://computer-drives-storage.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_raid_storage_improves_performance
The real-world performance benefits possible in a single-user PC situation is not a given for most people, because the benefits rely on multiple independent, simultaneous requests. One person running most desktop applications may not see a big payback in performance because they are not written to do asynchronous I/O to disks. Understanding this can help avoid disappointment.
http://www.scs-myung.com/v2/index.p...nt&print=1&page=&Itemid=55&option=com_content
What about performance? This, we suspect, is the primary reason why so many users doggedly pursue the RAID 0 "holy grail." This inevitably leads to dissapointment by those that notice little or no performance gain.....As stated above, first person shooters rarely benefit from RAID 0.__ Frame rates will almost certainly not improve, as they are determined by your video card and processor above all else. In fact, theoretically your FPS frame rate may decrease, since many low-cost RAID controllers (anything made by Highpoint at the tiem of this writing, and most cards from Promise) implement RAID in software, so the process of splitting and combining data across your drives is done by your CPU, which could better be utilized by your game. That said, the CPU overhead of RAID0 is minimal on high-performance processors.
http://jeff-sue.suite101.com/how-raid-storage-improves-performance-a101975
"The real-world performance benefits possible in a single-user PC situation is not a given for most people, because the benefits rely on multiple independent, simultaneous requests. One person running most desktop applications may not see a big payback in performance because they are not written to do asynchronous I/O to disks. Understanding this can help avoid disappointment."
Even the HD manufacturers limit RAID's advantages to very specific applications and non of them involves gaming:
http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/
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Yes, yes, it's old stuff .... but that's cause this is old news, to the extent that it's no longer looked at anymore.
I most recently undertook another look with a pair of 256 GB Samsung 850 Pros. Played with it for 3 months ... Samsung utilities were unfunctional ... timed tests just weren't delivering anything outside some benchmarks. before giving up, I called Samsung and before I had 8 words out of my mouth, the technician announced "We do not support, nor do we recommend using our products in RAID 0."
On the down side, a fresh boot would sometimes fail with a RAID issue requiring entering the BIOS and fiddling around to make it see the array again. That was about 3 years ago and I will take another shot (No. 7) on next build. I'm not expecting anything different tho ... I should mention that the primary use of this PC is as a CAD workstation, tho in evenings it serves duty as a Flight Sim and Gaming Box.
