Game Load Times, SSDs & Raid 0

[MostlyHarmless]

Hi all, I'm wondering how effective is Raid 0 to game load times?

With the upcoming release of Haswell accompanied by a new chipset which I expect to increase the number of SATA3 ports capable of Raid arrays it has me wondering if i could set up a number of SSDs in raid 0.

My understanding is that there are 2 important benchmarks for SSD reads; random reads and sequential reads and RAID 0 will do nothing for random reads but significantly improve sequential reads. Games loads, I expect, would read a lot of data sequentially because of the large amount of texture data, so sequential reads would be the most important factor.

Is this right and would would this mean that I could in theory buy a number of cheap low capacity SSDs to build an array would be better for load times compared to a larger, more expensive, higher IOPS drive? Or does RAID offer little benefit for game load times? (Not noticeable, Other bottlenecks?)

I am also wondering about that stability of Intel's Raid controller with SSDs. I've only used Raid 0 once and that was with hard drives 6 years ago. I eventually gave up because the array kept on collapsing.

Opinions would be appreciated, I've been wondering about this for a while.

[Whaler_99]

Couple of things here - a single higher end SSD can pretty much saturate even a Sata3 controller. Running SSD's in RAID0 really only have performance boosts when you are running serious benchmarks. You will really see no performance improvement on a couple of SSD's in RAID0 for general use.

The Intel RAID controller is actually pretty good considering. A lot of "drops" from a RAID array is most likely using consumer based hard drives. Many drives have various power saving features that spin the drive down, as well as power saving on your computer. If the drive spins down, the RAID controller can think the drive has failed and marks it as such, so you then have to go through a rebuild. Also, power saving on a PC can have this effect sometimes. Remember, RAID use to be only a enterprise solution on servers and such, using high end drives, 7/24 systems, etc. Now we are using it more and more in consumer solutions. But still need to maintain certain aspects of the RAID config for it to be effective.

Want the best load times? By a single higher end SSD - and also, the larger capacity drives will have a bit better performance then smaller - so go 240GB versus 120. If you can go to a 480GB as typically that would have better numbers then the 240, etc...

[MostlyHarmless]

Thanks! I didn't even think about the controller.

[gliliumho]

I've been running RAID 0 on my 2x160GB HDDs for years and it failed me once. I was using the on-board RAID controller so I was wondering if that's recommended or not. Or should I get a RAID card for running RAID system in the future?