Quote: Original post by AnthonyN1974
of course raid has other benifits, i have never stated otherwise. if you read my post again you will find I am quoting only about gaming performance. not many games will benifit from having a raid system when the game is running. sorry but that is fact. because this is about gamimg only what people are looking at are load speeds, yes in game loading too.

since you keep harping on about REDUNDANCY, you can easly get around this on a home pc with just a backup once a week. how much changes on a games pc from week to week, a few save files that are important to the user? maybe a internet site.

as I have said before. all most people will do, when people say

Quote: If you're splurging, you should also look into setting up a RAID. HD access is one of the current biggest performance hits in gaming

.
Is slap another hard disk in a pc. "Because the motherboard says it supports raid" and not notice much diffrence.

Only mentioning game performance and not mentioning any other benefit, then stating raid is not worth it, is the equivalent of a one sided argument. In essesence you stated the other benefits are not worth it by the very fact that you didn't mention them.

" because this is about gamimg only what people are looking at are load speeds, yes in game loading too."-

Well, there are two things here. I have a raid 0 setup with two raptor x's, and i can tell a large difference in loads times when they're raided... My guess would be the tests from which you got your stats from are not entirely setup right. Or the load times were bottlenecked in other places than just the drive. That, and you just can't ignore the fact that it assists in performance elsewhere, whether or not they're using that as a benchmark is irrelevant.

"since you keep harping on about REDUNDANCY, you can easly get around this on a home pc with just a backup once a week. how much changes on a games pc from week to week, a few save files that are important to the user? maybe a internet site."-

Well, that is not nearly the same at all. In raid you get a realtime backup, bit for bit, with regular data backups your data will be lagging behind a day, a week...etc (and trust me, there are a lot of files changing all the time). Along with this, if a drive dies in raid, you can still run your computer, not the case with regular data backup where you have to get a new drive, reinstall your os, reinstall your apps, drivers, then restore the data from the backup and continue running.
Now, there is backup exec and acronis. I use acronis at home, its quite nice. Basically it creates an image of your hard drive, bit for bit. If a hard drive dies on a system with no raid, you can simply restore the backup and thats it. The backup in this case restores the os install, all settings, and all data (and stores it all in a compressed format). However, while this is cool, it is still a far cry from the realtime redundancy offered by raid, and depending on the version you go for it at the very least cost as much as a new raid controller (though imo both should be used together).

"Is slap another hard disk in a pc. "Because the motherboard says it supports raid" and not notice much diffrence."
True, some may do this. But honestly, i wouldn't expect that number to be very large. Eitherway, this is a pretty weak point.

Quote:
"Is slap another hard disk in a pc. "Because the motherboard says it supports raid" and not notice much diffrence."
True, some may do this. But honestly, i wouldn't expect that number to be very large. Eitherway, this is a pretty weak point.

I will think you will find this the other way around. People do not generally know the difference. And think that the standard on board device is the same as a raid card. Raid is not a basic concept for people to grasp as there are a few different setups that all have + and – points. not that it is hard to understad, just because people are generally lazy and just look at gfx card and the amount of ram the system has.

Quote:
Well, there are two things here. I have a raid 0 setup with two raptor x's

also if you have raid 0 you have no redundancy if a drive fails you will lose all your data, in fact the more drives you have in a raid 0 array the larger chance of a disk error, and data loss. You do have faster access ,throughput and full capacity however. it is also worth noting that raid 0 has no fault tolerance.

as for the benchmark figures i quoted. the bottle neck will be the mobo raid, from what I can remember it was raid 0 with 2 raptors.

as for backups i use a systems like yours called snapshot. and works by taking an image of the drive and not a backupof the files.

it would be nice for people to know what load times you get loading popular games like crisis

I'm a little surprised nobody mentioned the new Geforce 280 GTX. Why go with a 9800x2 when you know it's already outdated? I just mention it because you seem to have the cash to afford such a card in your rig.

About the harddrive performance: I use a WD Raptor in my PC and I haven't regretted it for a single second, but I wouldn't recommend setting more of them in a RAID setup. It's just too much money that could be better spent on components more important to gaming. You could buy ridiculous amounts of RAM, so that you never have to swap from the harddrive ;)

Jeroen

Quote:
I will think you will find this the other way around. People do not generally know the difference. And think that the standard on board device is the same as a raid card. Raid is not a basic concept for people to grasp as there are a few different setups that all have + and – points. not that it is hard to understad, just because people are generally lazy and just look at gfx card and the amount of ram the system has.

To be honest it is pointless to discuss this unless you have some stats to present. Some may act like this. But generally those building their own computer will often be learning in the process. Which means more than likely actually reading what raid is. It would be unlikely for a person to have the drive to learn to build their own computer but then get lazy and not learn anything about raid and incorrectly set it up.

Quote:

Quote:
Well, there are two things here. I have a raid 0 setup with two raptor x's

also if you have raid 0 you have no redundancy if a drive fails you will lose all your data, in fact the more drives you have in a raid 0 array the larger chance of a disk error, and data loss. You do have faster access ,throughput and full capacity however. it is also worth noting that raid 0 has no fault tolerance.

I never stated raid 0 has any redundancy so i am not sure what your point is, i was just giving a personal example. It is worth noting raid 10/01 actually has better performance than plain raid 0 and does offer redundancy.

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as for the benchmark figures i quoted. the bottle neck will be the mobo raid, from what I can remember it was raid 0 with 2 raptors.

as for backups i use a systems like yours called snapshot. and works by taking an image of the drive and not a backupof the files.

Not sure if you didn't read my reply right, but that is what acronis and back exec do too. Though they also give you the option of just doing data.

Quote: Original post by godmodder
I'm a little surprised nobody mentioned the new Geforce 280 GTX. Why go with a 9800x2 when you know it's already outdated? I just mention it because you seem to have the cash to afford such a card in your rig.

About the harddrive performance: I use a WD Raptor in my PC and I haven't regretted it for a single second, but I wouldn't recommend setting more of them in a RAID setup. It's just too much money that could be better spent on components more important to gaming. You could buy ridiculous amounts of RAM, so that you never have to swap from the harddrive ;)

Jeroen

Yeah i'm with you. However, i'm about to buy two more and put them in raid 10. This will give a nice 190-200 MB/s sustained throughput. And since ram is so cheap i'm about to buy 8 gigs of ddr2 1000 ram. I'm going to use windows server os for the pae support of 32 gigs of ram, or research a bit more into hacking full unlimited pae support into xp (its been done under vista). I would go 64 bit, but not all of my usual apps support 64 bit.
This will allow for an excellent hard drive subsystem and memory system to give excellent performance. But if you read my reply above, you will see, no matter how much ram you have, paging usually will still occur (you may disable paging, but then you will incur a performance hit). This is especially true for the apps i use, which are very page file hungry, like photoshop and 3ds max.

Quote:
To be honest it is pointless to discuss this unless you have some stats to present. Some may act like this. But generally those building their own computer will often be learning in the process. Which means more than likely actually reading what raid is. It would be unlikely for a person to have the drive to learn to build their own computer but then get lazy and not learn anything about raid and incorrectly set it up.

this is just from my experiance. people just do not read up on things before they buy them, especially the younger ones. even if they do read up on it, they would have to read an artical that states that mobo raid is not worth it, unless you want a cheep solution for disk redundancy. maybe it is diffrent over there? but i get asked all the time about systems that people have bought from the supermarket and will not run there game.

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I never stated raid 0 has any redundancy so i am not sure what your point is, i was just giving a personal example. It is worth noting raid 10/01 actually has better performance than plain raid 0 and does offer redundancy.

this was not realy aimed at you but just other people that read the post.
just so people know when they read this

Quote:
Next we move on to the other point as to why raid is good. REDUNDANCY! What happens with a regular hard drive dies? You loose everything, all settings, all data, everything. What happens when a raid setup has a hard drive failure? Nothing! You can go about your business. Heck, in raid 10 you can have two hard drive failures and still keep on trucking (one from each mirrored pair). After you experience a failure you simply just need to plug in a new drive to replace the dead one, and the raid will rebuild itself. Even ignoring the obvious performance benefits, it is hard to argue that the redundancy raid offers does not benefit every user. Even better are the raid controllers that offer a hot spare. Meaning, if you have a drive failure, you can go about your business and your spare will automatically replace the dead drive and rebuild the array.

then see you have a raid 0 they might jump to conclusions

and yep raid 10 is what I would choose but it does cost those extra drives and you do get 0% extra disk space. however I would not put it in a gaming rig. if you are a avid user of 3dmax ,photoshop or db/file server and other io intensive apps then yea, it is well worth it for the reasons you stated. if you need almost 0 down time then yes you MUST have it. then i can see a very very valid point for raid.

if you just play games on a pc then raid is not worth the extra cash. far far better getting an extra gfx card or somthing for gaming. hell you can buy quite a few games for an extra hard disk(s) and a controler card.

Quote:
Now, there is backup exec and acronis. I use acronis at home, its quite nice. Basically it creates an image of your hard drive, bit for bit. If a hard drive dies on a system with no raid, you can simply restore the backup and thats it. The backup in this case restores the os install, all settings, and all data (and stores it all in a compressed format).

sounds like the apps are similar
Snapshot

Quote:
I'm a little surprised nobody mentioned the new Geforce 280 GTX. Why go with a 9800x2 when you know it's already outdated? I just mention it because you seem to have the cash to afford such a card in your rig.

About the harddrive performance: I use a WD Raptor in my PC and I haven't regretted it for a single second, but I wouldn't recommend setting more of them in a RAID setup. It's just too much money that could be better spent on components more important to gaming. You could buy ridiculous amounts of RAM, so that you never have to swap from the harddrive ;)

Jeroen

I have to agree with Jarrod, so do not disable your page file. as for the gfx card yep it is a good one, but I do not think it was realsed when this post started just announced. however I could be wrong.

as for lots of ram. this is not a easy one to answer some test have shown for gaming that 4gb is the optimum but this could just of been an issue with the mobo it was tested on, when they put 8 gig in it droped very slightly.

I run raptors in RAID 1 -- I don't want to have any downtime if a hard drive goes down.

I recently specced a new machine, mostly for fun, with 15,000 rpm SAS drives and a quad Xeon. Unfortunately, it needed the $650 Intel motherboard, plus a $300 Adaptec controller (as the cheaper ones are crap), and FB memory, so the price rose quicker than I wanted...

Best value for money: GTX 260. If you really need SLI, get two of them.