raptors

[BaNDiT]

Hey, im building a new computer pretty soon, and im having a hard time choosing some hard drives. this is what im thinking.

1.) 1-74GB WD Raptor
or
2.) 2-37GB WD Raptors in RAID 0

Which selection would be better? Would there be a difference in game preformance? If so, about how much? thanks.

 

[umop]

I just bought and installed my 2x 37 GB WD Raptors in RAID 0 and I can't tell you enoug how fast they are. The answer is simple: do you want 74 gigs with a single 10k rpm drive, or 74 gigs with 2x 10k RPM drives for a little bit more?

The only way it would affect game performance is if the game needed to cache or use virtual memory, which means you would have insufficient memory. If you can afford those, I doubt you will have insufficient memory, so they would serve to load maps really quickly.

 

[BaNDiT]

so, there is no fps advantage w/ 2 37 raptors instead of 1 74 raptor???

 

[psyno]

Absolutely no effect on FPS whatsoever, as long as you're not paging as umop described. The new 74 GB model is actually faster and quiter than it's smaller brother, but it just can't beat two of them in RAID 0.

 

[blackeye]

I think but im not sure that two drives in raid zero take information to the cpu twice as fast. I think they say some stuff about this in junes edition of maximum pc. A single hard drive may have an average read spead of 47 mb/sec but two in raid 0 will have 95 mb/sec. Someone on these forums said befor that it has latency issues. But im not sure what that is.

 

[psyno]

Theoretically, the performance of mutliple (identical) disks in RAID 0 is the speed of one disk times the number of disks in the RAID. If you had 4 disks, for example, you would theoretically have 4 times the performance. The actual performance will vary greatly, depending on the controller.

RAID 0 isn't actually RAID at all, but just plain disk striping. Basically, the controller has each disk do [1/(number of disks)] of the work. It is the least secure of any RAID mode, but it's the fastest overall and 100% efficient as far as disk usage goes.

 

[Asus]

It really depends on the controller.
Many onboard raid controllers are poor.
CPU usage is a big thing as well.
I am happy with my single 74gb drive.

Here are 3 links with a good deal of info.
Link
Link
Link

The biggest improvement going to Raid-0 is write speeds. It's all in disk access performance. When you game, all info the game needs at that time is all in RAM.

The only performance hit with Raid-0 is latency.

 

[x84D80Yx]

2 36GB raptors on RAID 0 is faster than 1 74GB raptor
but 1 74GB raptor is a lil faster than 1 36GB raptor

so if you want speed. go for the RAID 36GB setup. trust me i have them in my system and they pwn

 

[shiv]

2 36GB raptors on RAID 0 is faster than 1 74GB raptor
but 1 74GB raptor is a lil faster than 1 36GB raptor

so if you want speed. go for the RAID 36GB setup. trust me i have them in my system and they pwn

Ive got the same set up as you and it is nice to be the first person to pop up in the map.

 

[x84D80Yx]

yeah, they are definately speed demons. loads everything so dang quick lol. 1 raptor my windows xp loaded in like 3-4 seconds. (loading bar part). 2 of them the time is like 1-2 seconds(loading bar part)..

games and intensive programs like photoshop load alot quicker also.