What difference does raid0 do for a steam library?

[Gdourado]

Hello, how are you?

I am wondering what difference does a raid0 with two HHD's make as a drive for steam library against a single hdd?

Will games load noticably faster?

Is it worth it for the performance alone?

Cheers!

[Godlygamer23]

You may notice some performance improvements.

 

Is it worth it for the performance alone? Subjective, but I would say no. I haven't used any RAID config with my games in my local build(I have stream games from a NAS though) and haven't noticed any excessively long load times. But others that have actually tried it might say something different.

[Thony]

Isnt raid0 the fastest possible solution ? Unreliable though.

[FloRolf]

9 minutes ago, Thony said:

Isnt raid0 the fastest possible solution ? Unreliable though.

Raid 0 can only be as fast as the drives.

Raid0 with shitty HDDs is slower than a nice SSD...

 

I for myself have noticed an improvment of loading times in Just Cause 3 (which suffers from horrible loading times) when i moved from a single WD Green to Dual Reds in Raid0.

 

 

EDIT: But if your only objective is loading times in games i'd say it's not worth it if it costs you double the Money. For frequent copying of large files it's definetly worth it.

 

For example, my Green had Speeds of about 80mb/s while my Raid0 has ~200mb/s

[Naeaes]

It'll double your speeds. A crude simplification would be that all your loading times will be halved. Games themselves aren't really reliant on HDD speeds so the experience won't be affected. It's not like you gain FPS from RAID0. BUt if launch and loading times are an issue for you, it'll definitely be noticeable. Albeit, keep in mind, even a solo SSD will still be faster than 2-HDD RAID0 array. So if you're buying something, get two SSDs and RAID0 those. Now, that's fast!

 

On the reliability side of things, RAID0 will be over twice as likely to lose your data and render it unrecoverable (assuming the two drives are equally likely to fail and the RAID controller can fail too) With that said, it's still an unlikely scenario. With quality parts, you're looking at going from one in a thousand to two in a thousand. As probabilities go, you're more likely to delete something by accident or have an OS issue. I'd still keep my backups on a RAID1 array just to play it safe. Run a robocopy script hourly to copy your data over or something.