RAID Performance increase?

[skool h8r]

Hi all,
i'm thinking of setting up a RAID 0 with 2 80Gb seagate SATA-II drives. Something that's only just hit me is performance. What sort of performance increase should i expect if i have windows on an IDE, and games and things on the SATA-II drives? Would it be noticable or not? I have the Nvidia NF4 chipset, and i also have the Silicon Image Sil3132. I'm not sure which i would be better using. I want to go for better performance, as opposed to data protection. I mean, i could buy 4 disks and set up both a RAID 0 and a RAID 1, but that's a waste of money.

So yeah, what sort of performance is typical in a RAID 0 with SATA-II drives?

Thanks,
Scott

[Gizmo]

Oi! That's a hard question to answer, as it depends on a huge number of variables: what is the sustained data tranfer rate of the drives, how big is the drive cache, what kind of applications are you running, what kind of bandwidth do you have on the chipset (the SIL will be limited to PCI speeds, about 100 MB/S, max, while the NF4 chipset will have access to full HT bandwidth).

In general, you won't see much more than a 40% increase in throughput for most things. For some things you may not see any change because you are CPU limited already (the application reads some data, then spends a lot of time processing it before reading more data), for some applications you could see a doubling of throughput.

[JimF]

As Gizmo said it depends on a large number of factors - but my file system benchmarks (SiSoft Sandra) went from 49,809 (PATA) to 98,621 (SATA RAID) on comparable drives (Samsung SP160) and large files do seem to load almost twice as fast.

I'm running evrything on the RAID and using a USB drive as a data backup on the basis that calls the OS, temporary files and the paging file all benefit from the faster access. Windows runs noticeably faster but to be honest I don't see a significant improvement in games performance (eg Prey) - memory (mainboard and GPU) seems to have made more difference.