[unclokie]

I am building a new P.C. and I want to improve it's performance as much as possible. I won't use this P.C. for gaming, I run Photoshop CS2 and I plan to get into video editing as well. I am wondering if the performance of 2 PATA drives used in RAID 0 configuration would really provide any noticeable improvement as I already have 2 identical drives. Or would I be just as well served by getting a newer single SATA drive. I don't have an unlimited budget, but I would like to know that I've optimized the recourses I have. Your guidance is appreciated.

Otis

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RAID 0 provides next to no speed increase whatsoever in the real world. There is no noticeable improvement, in fact its not worth spending the money on for the second drive, you'd be better off buying a single (SATA) drive on its own with the capacity that the RAID would give you.

[Neil Jones]

RAID 0 provides next to no speed increase whatsoever in the real world. There is no noticeable improvement, in fact its not worth spending the money on for the second drive, you'd be better off buying a single (SATA) drive on its own with the capacity that the RAID would give you.

[unclokie]

RAID 0 provides next to no speed increase whatsoever in the real world. There is no noticeable improvement, in fact its not worth spending the money on for the second drive, you'd be better off buying a single (SATA) drive on its own with the capacity that the RAID would give you.

As I said I already have 2 identical disks so I would not have to buy them and the ide RAID controller is $11.00 at NewEgg. I had been told that for large photo and video files it is a better performance. I don't know obviously.

[Neil Jones]

As I said I already have 2 identical disks so I would not have to buy them and the ide RAID controller is $11.00 at NewEgg. I had been told that for large photo and video files it is a better performance. I don't know obviously.

In theory RAID 0 is a speed increaser, but as I said in reality its ever so slight its not worth the time and effort to do it; you wouldn't notice any difference even with large photos and video files.

[kidnova]

Here is an outstanding article that explains RAID in easy to understand terms.

http://www.pugetsyst...icles.php?id=29

[tomfarr]

Thank you for that link, kidnova.

I am the noob's noob here. Shopping for a motherboard, and see 'Raid' mentioned in a review. I'm glad to see I can forget about learning any more about raid.

But now I have something new I can throw at the server guys here at work!

Edited by tomfarr, 05 July 2007 - 10:22 PM.

[dsenette]

the "advantages" ofr Raid 0 in regards to speed are all based on gains in speed when writing to two disks simultaneously....instead of having to send two different commands to write to two seperate physical disks..your processor will just send one command to the raid controller and it will handle how it distributes the information across the two disks (and subsequently how it gets the data back off the two seperate disks)...so if you're using 2 seperate disks...one for the OS and programs and one for data files (like your pictures)..then there would be SOME improvement in access speed...but not enough to go through the hassle of setting up a raid array...especially concidering you'd have to format both drives and start from scratch to set up the raid....as was mentioned before....if you've got SATA ports on your drive...get a speedy sata drive (you can get some really fast really large ones for rellatively cheap) and store all your picture files on that drive only...and use the other IDE drives for system stuff..(one for your opperating system and the other for NON photo type info)