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ive had a lot of raid boards but never tried the raid part. ive seen it here i think that running a raid config can increase hdd performance. i just picked up a couple sata wd drives to try it. im wondering of the 2 raid modes my mobo supports 0 or 1 which would give me the best performance increase. hat hat

Raid 0 will give you more performance, but I would only use this for non critical data. Raid 1 will slow you down a tad due to redundancy. Has to write same data to the platters twice. I ran raid 0 for a long time and never had issues but ya never know when they go south...

its a gaming rig im mostly looking for faster map load times.

Yup, RAID 0, but don't trust it. It'll fail ya just when you least expect it to (though I've had some last for years).

Ive found better load times were achieved with faster/more memory. Then again, might have just been the games I was playing.

how exactly does it fail? one of the hdds fail? loses config somehow?
my boards already maxed out on ram 8 gigs

More memory does in fact make a difference in some game load times. To a point.

They can fail in a number of ways, but usually from one of the drives failing or even a loose cable. Also, sometimes the controller itself fails.

With RAID 0 you have twice the risk. If either of the 2 drives fails, you lose it all.

With the speed of modern drives, I see little compelling reason to go RAID 0 anymore except MAYBE for pro video editing.

Frankly, you're better off just buying a Velociraptor or an SSD for your boot drive. That's what I did. I have a Velociraptor for my boot drive and a 1Tb Seagate for my data. I'm seriously considering swapping out my 150Gb Velociraptor for an 80Gb Intel X25-M SSD. At $200 it's cost effective for the performance gain (that's nearly what I paid for the Velociraptor last year).

ok heres the results from my drives using hd tune pro 4 keep in mind i got the 2 raid drives at 40 each so for 80 bux i get a nice performance increase. also the green drive performs better than i thought it would.

raid0 2x wd blue 500gb
max 110.8 mb/s
avg 107.0 mb/s
access 15.1 m/s
burst 104.9 mb/s

seagate 320
max 67.8 mb/s
avg 61.8 mb/s
access 13.4 m/s
burst 146.9 mb/s

wd 500 green
max 78.4 mb/s
avg 63.2 mb/s
access 14.3 m/s
burst 144.5 mb/s

Decent results there (a tad lower than I expected, but then again, I've been playing with server drives). Yeah, the green drives get a lot of crap that they don't deserve. Just because they are 5400rpm doesn't mean that they don't still spin plenty fast to move some data.

normalicy wrote:Decent results there (a tad lower than I expected, but then again, I've been playing with server drives). Yeah, the green drives get a lot of crap that they don't deserve. Just because they are 5400rpm doesn't mean that they don't still spin plenty fast to move some data.

yeah i probly should have got the black edition drives but tiger direct was selling the retail packaged blues for 40 each. now i have a total of 2.0 tb storage in this machine. unfortunatly it didnt do a thing for my framerates but i didnt expect it to. when that card gets here it should take care of that.

Those speeds aren't anything to complain about though. The black editions aren't a ton faster. Now a pair of velocaraptors, that's different. I've never had a hard drive help my game speeds, only load times. Funny you mention the video card, I just got my first tracking update. You should get it pretty soon.

I would expect 2 of these in a RAID 0 and you'll be giggling at the speed. lol

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820139175

the above advice is good. don't keep any data except the OS on a RAID 0 setup. I just updated my PC but prior to, I had a pair of WD Raptor 36GBs in a RAID 0 for 6 years and rarely turned the PC off. I even had a cable come loose on one of them producing a boot error. I plugged the cable back in and it booted like nothing had ever happened! Good to be lucky sometimes.

in a 2 drive raid0 isnt double the speed all you should realistically expect?

You'll never get double the speed with an onboard controller. Most onboard controllers are software based, so you take some performance hit for that.

Honestly, I wouldn't bother with RAID 0 nowadays unless you're doing something specialized like pro video editing.

Get a Velociraptor or an SSD boot drive.