I have a quick question about what I should do on my next computer. Keep in mind I have money to spend but if I won't see a significant increase in performance I'm not wanting to waste money on it. That said, I want to know if a 160GB 7,200rpm w/ 8MB cache hard drive will be "significantly" slower than a RAID 0 setup of 2x80GB 7,200rpm w/ 8MB cache as far as load times and overall performance within games is concerned? The RAID 0 config is $30 extra...

Honest to God truth is you won't notice any difference in performance. While some may swear by RAID, it has been proven that there is no real difference in performance. A RAID array may get a few extra points on bandwith but it has a serious drawback........you stand a much better chance of losing all your data.

Well Hapee does have a point, to a degree..

I will say that I have been running a raid rig almost from the day the first IDE raid board came on the market...

I have used a number of different drives as well and have never had a drive fail or loose an array....

There a distinct perfomance advantages with raid 0 in particular with video edditing....

Far lower level of fragmantation, the release or both primary/secondary controllers for other devices, etc..

I havent done any benchmarking as far as games a are concerned, but I have never heard of any problems...

There is a raid utility on the mother board supprt cd which you can install, it will keep an eye on the raid array and ny issues with the hrad drives, it will warn you in advance...

If it does happen, the utility will tell you what and how to chnage the faulty drive, adn it will rebuild the array without loss of data..... I ahve never had to do this though...

I ahve not heard of any one at this satge thats had an issue, but would love to hear from any one that had problems, and what casused them..

My personal oppinion is go for it..

IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT

A8N-SLI Deluxe
AMD X64 3500+ Wnchst
Corsair 2x512 DDR400 Dual Channel
GV-NX6600128D PCIX Graphics Card
Ggbyte GT Pro CPU Cooler
Zalman VF700-CU VGA Cool

I've also been using RAID and striping arrays for years, and I'd like to add my $.02.

Yes, you will see performance improvements using a striping array, especially with programs whose bottleneck is hard drive I/O speed. Video editing/encoding goes a lot faster when writing the output to a striping array. I run my OS and installed applications from a striping array--I definitely notice a boost with Windows load times, editing programs, and my sytem feels a bit more responsive.

I also agree that you probably won't notice a performance boost while gaming. Many claim that level load times are cut in half, but I don't see it. Most "levels" are stored in compressed form anyway, and the CPU is more often the bottleneck because it has to extract usable data from the compressed packs. Running a striping array just for increased gaming performance is a waste of money. Buy a killer video card and lots of RAM instead.

As for reliability, RAID is more reliable than a single drive; a non-redundant striping array is less reliable than a single drive. Period. Drives die, stripes break, people want to move their drives from an older motherboard or controller to a new one, etc. But as long as you never think of a striping array as safe, long-term storage space, you'll be fine.

"If it ain't broke, upgrade anyway."