Is RAID0 worth it for HDDs: gaming and productivity

[asim1999]

I was wondering if HDD RAID 0 would make a difference in gaming or productivity as I’m setting up my new 1950X system. 

[Guest]

Why not get a 1tb SSD at that point? Faster than 2 hdd's and much less noise/heat.

[asim1999]

3 minutes ago, Some Random Member said:

Why not get a 1tb SSD at that point? Faster than 2 hdd's and much less noise/heat.

HDDs in raid0 are still cheaper here 

[Tabs]

If you don't have a specific purpose that you know RAID will actually solve, you shouldn't use it.

 

The only forms of raid even worth considering are for redundancy reasons - RAID 0 offers none of the real-world performance that you can get from even a cheap SSD because it actually hurts random performance in many instances and only increases sequential performance - so it's great for a fileserver where a 10GBe link would saturate 1-2 drives and you're only doing big transfers, but for normal client workloads it gives you nothing of value. It only has downsides.

 

Buy a larger HDD for transient and large datasets, and get an SSD as a boot drive and live file storage.

[SZ1357]

On 7/17/2018 at 4:17 AM, asim1999 said:

I was wondering if HDD RAID 0 would make a difference in gaming or productivity as I’m setting up my new 1950X system. 

I don’t think raid 0 is good, your drive life is shortened by a bit and as you know you lose data if one drive fails. Try optane?

[SZ1357]

1 minute ago, SZ1357 said:

I don’t think raid 0 is good, your drive life is shortened by a bit and as you know you lose data if one drive fails. Try optane?

Whoops sorry never mind I only just saw the 1950x part

[chiller15]

No, get a SSD instead.

 

I would never recommend RAID0. You're halving your storage and doubling the risk of data loss for not a huge performance gain.

[TechyBen]

Depending on the type and age of your PC, you could even try Intel (optane) or AMD (I forget the name) caching drives.

 

Or get a cheap SSD and manually move the games over.

[pallen98]

Not worth the money to set up raid 0

[DudefromHamburg]

@asim1999 are you keeping existing drives or getting new ones? And are you using a dedicated raid card or do you utilize onboard raid? and for how much disk space are you aiming here?

You biggest advantage will be the bypass of the 600 MB/s limitation for 1 SSD on a SATA port (not talking NVME here, plain old SATA3 SSD). In a perfect world your Raid 0 is hardcapped at 1100-1200 mb/s.

But, you talk HDDs and price points, so i tried to research the UK market. Usable HDDs start at 33 GBP for a 1 TB drive. ( Toshiba DT01ACA100). This drive gets you 190MBs read and 155 MBs write. (top scores, not even avg.). even if you scale 100%, you get 380/315 MBs r/w. for 66 GBP, you get a Samsung 860 Evo for less which still has about 20% better read and write rates.

given that i just compared 2TB to 250gig, one needs answes for the above asked questions to give a usefull answer, otherwise, too many variables.