RAID 0?

  • Thread starter Thread starter David
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David

Hi,

I want to set up raid 0 on my Abit KT7aRAID m/b as I've read it will give me
a noticable speed increase. I have 512Mb PC133 + 14GHz AMD Thunderbird +
WinXP Home SP2. Never done this before so I have a few questions;

Would I be better off buying a new m/b/cpu/mem for a speed increase than 2
80Gb Hard drives + raid?

Do I need 2 identical drives or could I use say a 120Gb + 80Gb and if so
should the 120Gb be partitioned as an 80Gb?

Thankyou,

David
 
Hi,

I want to set up raid 0 on my Abit KT7aRAID m/b as I've read it will give me
a noticable speed increase. I have 512Mb PC133 + 14GHz AMD Thunderbird +
WinXP Home SP2. Never done this before so I have a few questions;

Would I be better off buying a new m/b/cpu/mem for a speed increase than 2
80Gb Hard drives + raid?

Do I need 2 identical drives or could I use say a 120Gb + 80Gb and if so
should the 120Gb be partitioned as an 80Gb?

Thankyou,

David
Click to expand...

It all depends on what your current bottleneck is. If you think your hard
drive is holding you back, then RAID-0 will increase your read/write speed.
However, if you're expecting Doom 3 to run faster or Photoshop to be
zippier, then you'll probably be disappointed.

What are you trying to do exactly? You can definitely get way more
performance boost from a new CPU/MB/Mem combo, but given than 80GB drives
don't cost much, I'm not sure how much new computer you could buy anyway for
the same cost.


Michael
 
Thanks Michael,

I'd just like to gain some extra performance - wherever it is! Having read
that Raid 0 makes a significant improvement but I cant say where until I've
tried it.

Thanks for your advice, as I thought the mobo/cpu/mem would be a better
choice for speed in games like the forthcoming Half-Life 2. I've got a
decent graphics card if I do change the rig.
Only thing is WindowsXP - I rang Microsoft to see if I could transfer over
my copy which I bought as OEM for my homebuilt machine a few months ago.
They said I could change just about everything else apart from the
motherboard. To be honest they were a bit vague on changing the hard disks
as well even if I kept the old setup. They said "it's all the interpretation
of the licence! So it will cost me an extra £65 for another copy of WinXP
Home which bumps the total up to a little more than I can afford. Guess I
could get Win98SE cheaper but I feel cheated that a copy of WinXP I've had
for only a few months is now useless!

Thanks for listening to my rant,

David


Hence the Raid question.
 
David said:
Thanks Michael,

I'd just like to gain some extra performance - wherever it is! Having read
that Raid 0 makes a significant improvement but I cant say where until I've
tried it.

Thanks for your advice, as I thought the mobo/cpu/mem would be a better
choice for speed in games like the forthcoming Half-Life 2. I've got a
decent graphics card if I do change the rig.
Only thing is WindowsXP - I rang Microsoft to see if I could transfer over
my copy which I bought as OEM for my homebuilt machine a few months ago.
They said I could change just about everything else apart from the
motherboard. To be honest they were a bit vague on changing the hard disks
as well even if I kept the old setup. They said "it's all the interpretation
of the licence! So it will cost me an extra £65 for another copy of WinXP
Home which bumps the total up to a little more than I can afford. Guess I
could get Win98SE cheaper but I feel cheated that a copy of WinXP I've had
for only a few months is now useless!

Thanks for listening to my rant,

David


Hence the Raid question.
Click to expand...

If you get RAID-0, you will want something to do backups. For
example, a 120GB for backups, and two 80GB for the RAID itself. Hard
drives have a failure rate, and two hard drives together in RAID-0
have twice the failure rate, so keep this in mind.

You can use a 120GB with an 80GB in a RAID-0 array, but the capacity
will be twice the capacity of the smallest drive, i.e. 160 GB. Most
hardware RAID doesn't allow you to partition the wasted space as a
separate drive.

As for XP, if you upgrade the computer, it might ask you to reactivate
it. Just call them up at the activation line, tell them you changed
some components, and they'll give you a new number. It's painless. I
reused my license key through about 5 upgrades before I had to
actually call.

Look at this chart:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030217/cpu_charts-27.html

The Thunderbird 1.4 has a rating of 3602 on the PC Mark 2002 synthetic
CPU benchmark. If you get an XP 3000, you'll go up to 6646. That is
almost double the performance. If you can afford new RAM, CPU, and
Mobo, I'd go with this before the RAID.

Look in http://www.pricewatch.com/ for motherboard combos. You can
get an XP 3000 kit with a Gig of RAM for around $250. For a bit more,
you can get one of the lower-end Athlon 64s, and then you'll be smokin'.

I have an XP 2500/Radeon 9600 pro and was playing HL2 (via the CS
Source beta), and it rocks. On a Thunderbird, it definitely wouldn't
be as nice, and having RAID would only make it load faster.
 
Thanks for all your advice Shailesh,

You've been pretty thorough at answering my questions. I'm going to go with
the mobo/cpu/mem upgrade and possibly play around with raid later. The fact
that the games will only 'load' faster was a great help!

Thanks again,

David
 
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