I've heard some people talking about building gaming machines recently and would like to offer this piece of experience. I own a gaming rig as well, and been building some here and there since 17 (so for a whopping 7 years now ha-ha). I usually concentrated on CPU, memory, graphics card - the usual...

But let me tell you, all that is almost NOTHING compared to something we often overlook - hard drive (HDD) upgrade. Two ways to upgrade HDD - buy a faster one, or make a RAID configuration. RAID used to be complicated and scary, but it's built-in on most modern gaming motherboards and using it is very simple and easy, requiring no additional tools or software.

I did try a faster HDD once - bought a 10,000 RPM Raptor - and it was better, but no sigar b/c of sacrifices I had to make. 10k HDDs don't store much data (you'll be hard-pressed to find 500GB 10k HDD) and they usually are loud.

So what I did then is put RAID 0+1... I bought 4 identical hard drives - 7.2k RPM Samsung SpinPoint F1, 750GB each, w/ 32MB cache (model HD753LJ, in case you want to duplicate setup, they go for cheap now, about $75 each). Then I went to my BIOS and enabled RAID. Then I entered RAID utility on computer restart and selected 0+1 RAID for those 4 HDDs. Done! You just need to do all this before installing Windows or be ready to have everything wiped out. Windows sees all 4 as a single hard drive of 1.5GB (750GB + 750GB) and never even realizes that there's a RAID behind the scenes.

Improvement? One word: amazing!! Applications install insanely fast, games load in blink of an eye (COD starts in literally 3 seconds... map loads take about 5-6 seconds), and overall PC feels like a race car. Microsoft Office (most apps in the package) installed in less than 5 minutes, for example. Heavy apps that took 30 mins to install usually now take 5-8. Video drivers install in maybe 45-60 seconds. Windows updates are very fast once downloaded, etc. Moving files/etc. is also of course super fast. Even if I try to type password as soon as Windows login screen appears after boot, my anti-virus is loaded and Windows is ready to go (hard drive stops working) within about 8 seconds. Basically it's like switching from single core CPU to dual-core, but for hard drives. If you look up real tests online, usual improvement is about 70% on reading speed compared to single drive. But it feels like 200%, I don't kid.

Another benefit? Time saver. Some of us reinstall Windows every 6-12 months b/c of speed degradation... well, you need almost twice as long for speed to degrade to unusable level with these drives b/c they are almost twice as fast. How much does 1 day of reinstalling everything cost you? Well there you go, those 4 HDDs just got that much cheaper

Now some explanation for why I chose this setup. RAID 0+1 is a combination of RAID 0 (performance) and RAID 1 (reliability).

RAID 0 occurs first: when you write information to hard disk, it's split in half - one half is written to one HDD, another half  - to another. So you cut writing time in almost half. Same goes for reading - one half is read from one HDD, and another - from another. Read time also goes up a lot.

RAID 1 kicks in after that: the info from the two hard drives is then duplicated to the other 2 you got (since we have 4 total). This is in case one of the first 2 fails - the RAID will then automatically switch to the backup pair... you can take out the failed hard drive, plug new one in, and it will copy info from a backup drive onto the new drive and you're back to having 4 working drives, seamlessly.

Why not just RAID 0? That would be just as fast, yes, but RAID 0 is less reliable than using just one drive. Basically chances of failure increase at least twice b/c if one drive fails, the other is useless, but real increase is more than twice. There is science and statistics behind this, you can look it up, but real-world experience tells that RAID 0 configurations fail more often than normal drives. This is the price you pay for speed. That said, you should still be able to go years before replacing a hard drive, on average.

RAID 1 takes care of this by making a mirror. Not only do you have a spare backup automagically (no need to back anything but most important stuff anymore!), you can have at least one HDD fail without problems (one of mine failed just last week, actually, or maybe earlier actually... but I didn't even notice until I saw warning message during boot last week), you can actually have up to 2 drives fail as long as those 2 are the complimenting halves - the mirrored two will cover you until you replace failed drives.

Hope this helps someone. I've spent a ton of money on other components before (such as $1100 quad-core CPU) trying to have a race car computer... only to realize that a $200 CPU with $300 hard-drive setup will beat any $1100 CPU with $100 hard drive, by a wide margin. I'll never build a computer from now on without RAID 0+1 - I'll just buy little cheaper other components to have money for the hard drives. Make sure to pick nice drives - SpinPoint F1s been really good for me so far, for almost a year now, and they are not nearly as loud as 10k Raptor.

If you have any questions, just ask, will be happy to help. Cheers!



Last edited by AlexDaUA on Tue Aug 25, 2009 2:04 pm; edited 1 time in total

Whats RAID anyways, I know my motherboard has it, I just built a custom one in the fall.

I have 2 150 Gb 10,000 rpm in RAID 0 and I do not notice it any faster than without the raid. What am i doing wrong, if anything?
The computer is already fast. It's a core 2 quad extreme so perhaps that is why I don't see a speed increase with RAID 0.
I never even thought of 0 + 1 by having 4 hard identical hard drives.

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Wesley, do you see your setup as one 300 GB drive in Windows? I have a quad-core CPU as well so it's not that. Our CPUs are so good, they never been a bottleneck. I don't think I can EVER push my CPU past 60%. So when software is installing/uninstalling, game is loading, windows starting, etc. - CPU is not a bottleneck for the most part, hence you should have seen improvement by switching to RAID 0.

Another guess is that your motherboard RAID drivers are out of date, or the MB is a bit old and/or the quality of RAID implementation is low. Check for update to motherboard drivers and BIOS.

Also, I know you know about defragmentation, but there are utilities that can let you custom-defrag that I personally wasn't aware of until two years ago. For example, you can sort all files on disk by "Most Accessed", or push system files (such as pagefile) to front of hard drive (front of drives have fastest access times). MyDefrag is a good free utility like that, you can even say "push all .mp3 files to end of drive" since there's absolutely no need ever for fast access to mp3 files. You could see a really noticeable improvement in speed! http://www.mydefrag.com/

Durrty, check this page out - http://www.wdc.com/en/products/raid/.

As that article mentions, RAID 5 will do great as well. The benefit of RAID 5 is that you only lose space equal to capacity of 1 drive, but the downside is that you can only allow 1 hard drive to fail.

Hope this helps.

AlexDaUA It says it is 149 GB healthy STRIPE RAID 0.
I'd be interested in learning about other utilities to make improvements. I'd like to push sys to front and most accessed. That would make sense.

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Just call me Alex, please, although either way is fine =)

Wesley, something must be setup wrong... with two 150GB drives you should have 300 GB total space with RAID 0. Where did you read that from - during restart, before Windows starts? See if when you open My Computer in Windows if your total drive capacity is 150 GB also and let me know.

UPDATE: I underestimated performance increase. During writes, yes, performance is up about 70% b/c data is split into half and so only half of it is written to each disk simultaneously. (Would be 100% increase, but overhead eats a chunk). Reading, however, is way faster. When reading, assuming you have 4 drives and RAID 0+1, you really have half the data on drive 1, half on drive 2, and then a mirror of each on drives 3 and 4 (as redundancy in case drives 1 or 2 fail). So the system reads quarter of the requested chunk of data from each drive and combines it together... So if an application requests 100 MB of data, 25MB is read from each drive simultaneously, which means data is read 4 times faster, in theory.

Of course there is overhead, so in practice we get about 3-3.5 times faster reads depending on quality of motherboard, etc.!!! Definitely best upgrade hands down, in my humble opinion.

Alex I have partition of 29.2 GB and C:\ is 97.6 GB.
The RAID configuration at startup says 149.02 Stripe
I probably should not have partitioned it though.
I did check the box to do the advanced write back which brought the cpu from 3.2 to 3.5 GHz.
I could always reinstall if i learn better ways to set it up.
Hope no one objects to my posts on this subject. thanks. I could PM alex in the future if this
information isn't potentionally helpful to anyone else.

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My RAID drives are partitioned as well, Wesley, so you should be fine there. I have a partition for OS and applications, and another partition for files & music, projects, etc. RAID works on a lower level than partitioning and cares not of such things. Windows, for example, never even suspects RAID's existence.

Don't know what "advanced write back" is, to be honest, sounds like CPU overclocking feature, so sounds like it shouldn't affect you.

Wesley, try this: at boot, when it shows your RAID configuration, look for it to say something like "Press F10 to enter RAID utility".. once you enter the RAID utility, you should see more info on your config, such as what drives the 149 stripe is made of. In particular, you should see at least 2 drives being part of it and both showing as HEALTHY. We can setup a phone call one evening if you'd like to see if I can perhaps help with anything. I'm not all that smart, but 2 heads working together always beats 1 head