Nice start.
I agree RAID 1 is not a substitute for a backup but because it mirrors the main drive it's more forgiving for those situations where you do not backup as regularly as you should.
All the RAID arrays produce a small increase in performance but the biggest misconseption is that you absolutely need RAID 0 if you game. This is not the case. The performance increase when gaming is minimal and very dependant on whether the gaming data is being read from the memory or the hd. Some games actually read data from the hd most will read data from what is loaded into the memory. No RAID array will improve your gaming performance when you play MMOs as that is dependant on your isp and bandwidth as well as the MMOs servers.
By doing either a RAID 0 or RAID 1 you will get twice the storage for the same if not less cost as a single 10,000 or 15,000 RPM drive.
A short description of RAID 0+1 provided to me by Capricorn:
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Originally Posted by Capricorn Now one could ask the question, is there any way to get the saftey of RAID 1 with the speed of RAID 0? Almost, and it's called RAID 0+1. In RAID 0+1, the drives are both mirrored and striped. Most motherboards with RAID now support it. The downside is it takes four drives. Two drives mirror the other two (the RAID 1 part of 0+1) and the two drives being mirrored are using stiping (RAID 0). You get the speed of RAID 0 in that both sets of striped drives are being written to in parallel as before. You get the security of RAID 1 in that the primary RAID 0 drives are being mirrored with duplicate writes to the mirrored drives. Because there is synchronization involved in the mirroring, RAID 0+1 isn't quite as fast as RAID 0, but it's pretty close. If you're going to go with RAID 0+1, you probably want a motherboard with at least six SATA ports. The drives alone will take four. Any SATA DVD-ROM/RW, CD-ROM/RW will require more ports. |
Another blurp from Capricorn which I agree with 100% about why I am going with RAID 1:
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Originally Posted by Capricorn Why don't I use RAID 0+1 instead of just RAID 1? For one thing, it does still cost more. Also, one thing not mentioned before is RAID 1 (for most recent chipsets at least) acts like RAID 0 when reading. That is, when reading data, a RAID 1 system can be read using parallel reads of every other block from both drives just like RAID 0. When writing, it has to fall back to its slower-than-a-single-disk mode. The thing is that in decently configured gaming machines, reads outnumber writes significantly. I do get much of the RAID 0 (and 0+1) advantage without the cost outlay. If this was a database server, where the number of writes to disk would increase signficantly (but still be fewer than the reads), RAID 0+1 makes more sense. RAID 0 (and 0+1) do still have an advantage when it come to the virtual memory swap area. When swapping memory to disk, RAID 0 has a big advantage over RAID 1. The swapping memory to disk could potentially happen often in a typical machine. However, again, we're talking a gaming machine. Gaming machines are a minimum of 2GB now. With Vista, I'd go for 4GB. We put that much RAM in there to reduce the amount of (re-)reads and swapping virtual memory to disk. With enough RAM, memory swapping to disk practically eliminated. |