Best RAID setup for gaming?

[Slimshaedy]

Which RAID setup is the best for gaming? Redundancy isn't much of an issue I'm just looking for maximum performance.
I'm guessing raid0? But I'd rather check with the experts!

[ryanrich]

RAID-0 is the fastest, but you'll notice absolutely zero difference in gaming besides maybe a second or two off your load time. Completely not worth it IMO, especially if you're using onboard RAID and not a dedicated hardware RAID controller...

Suicide RAID is what I like to call RAID-0.

[hamin_aus]

He could buy 4 drives and go RAID1+0

[Nuke]

Agreed, RAID 0 is not really that fast. Most of the speed increase you will see will come from the cache on the raid controller card. Software RAID IMO sucks.
If you want speed, get yourself a SSD.

[DAE_JA_VOO]

Yep, the only thing RAID will do for gaming is faster load times, like Ryan said. I used to have two Velociraptors in RAID 0, and the price/benefit ration really made it impractical.

[ryanrich]

Yeah SSD is the way to go... I really want one, just waiting for prices to drop a leeeetle bit more!

[Slimshaedy]

And 2 ssds in RAID? Or will it be better running them independently?

[Nuke]

No need. A single Intel SSD is around 10x faster than a normal HDD(eg when you open Open Office on a SSD it opens in around 2-3 secs, compared to 30-45sec on a HDD).

[DAE_JA_VOO]

And 2 ssds in RAID? Or will it be better running them independently?

Slim, you're not hearing what we're saying

HDD speed doesn't affect game performance. You can RAID up 20 SSDs, and Crysis is still going to be slow. It'll load up the missions faster than you can blink, but it won't actually improve game performance.

[Slimshaedy]

Ya I knw it'll jus shorten the loading times. A friend of mine is asking me which is the better raid option for gaming on his new pc.I think he's getting ssds,not sure.
And since I'm busy watching those cbt nuggets on A+ he asked me. But that doesn't tell me which is better for gaming.
And on the nuggets they explain raid 0 1 and 5. But I've heard of raid 6 10 30. So I wasn't sure if those types were better.
But anyway thanx for the help:)

[DAE_JA_VOO]

Cool, well now you know Tell your buddy that it doesn't matter what he does

[Slimshaedy]

All those other raid setups are all based on the same technology,mirroring striping parity etc hey? Like what's raid 6 raid 10 raid 0+1?

[Nuke]

In Raid 6 2 drives can fail at the same time and you can still rebuild your data. 0+1 is a bit stupid IMO, 2 drives are mirrored and 2 are striped. Thus you use 4 drives to get the storage space of of 2, and a small speed increase. If you want to waste space and have 4 drives, just use Raid 6. Raid 6 is better if you use a massive SAN/NAS and have a lots of drives.