To RAID or not to RAID?

Here is my deal. I currently have the following computer.

MSI KT333 Ultra2 ARU IDE RAID
XP 2200+
512MB DDR 2700
GeForce 4 TI 4200 Turbo
SB Live! 5.1
Intel 10/100/1000 Nic
MSI TV Tuner/Capture Card
400Watt PS

48X Burner
52X CDROM
16X DVD ROM

2 X 60GB WD 7200RPM 8MB Cache Drives on RAID (striping)
13GB Maxtor 7200RPM 2MB Cache Drive

I currently have the 2 60GB drives setup on RAID as one big logical 120GB drive, windows is on a 20GB partition, all my bigger programs and games are on the remaining 100GB partition. All the 13GB has on it is the windows swap file (1GB).

I was wondering if my system would be faster to NOT run raid. Let's say I put Windows on one of the 60GB Drives, then my larger proggies and games on the other 60GB drive and finally the 13GB for the swap again. Would that make things faster or is RAID still faster even with having to access mutiple paritions over 2 drive + the swap? What is the optimum setup with what I have?

I also use this computer to edit and render digital video using Adobe Premiere 6.5 if that helps any.

In that config. there probably wouldn't be much to choose between RAID and non-RAID. It's a bit of PITA, but you could always run Sandra on the drives to see what score you get and compare that with the other numbers it shows you.

That should give you a rough idea of any difference.

You could also ask if someone has a similar setup to you but no RAID to run Sandra and give you their results to compare.

Well my swap drvie is way slower than the RAID. The RAID drives register higher than a 15K RPM Ultra SCSI 160GB Drive. I really have no way to test the RAID drives individually without trashing my install of windows. I need to do some serious testing, just hoping to save some time. Should I move my swap file to the RAID array?

I wouldnt move a swap file to any sort of RAID array .... Even though RAID0 is fast on reads, you still need to write temporary data to 2 disks .... if this was raid5 it would be easier to say no ... as why would you need parity data for temporary data ...

I dont believe you will see much of a loss or gain if or when the pagefile.sys is moved ....

just my 2cents

That's a mouthful . I think I will just leave the pagefile on the extra non-RAID drive. I would love to have that RAM drive setup you've got though.

Here is how it is setup up: On Channel one is CDRW as master. On channel two is 13GB pagefile drive as master and 52X CDROM as slave. Then on the promise controller are the two RAID drives. Each Raid drive has its own cable and is by itself.

How much is that rocket drive?

I have had my system setup on just that same config. you mentioned. BUT when would burn CDs or do disc to disc I would sometimes get errors and coasters. Once I move my config. to the current setup I have burned over 50 discs with no coaster! My system is now solid as granite, I just want to totally optimize it without suffering errors. So you think it would be overall better to just leave the pagefile on one of the RAID partitions?

Thanks for your suggestions.

After using Raid 0 for years, the maximum was with 4 harddrives, trying almost all different combinations, i came back to disabling Raid alltogether. My impression is that copying files from 1 harddisc to the other is faster then copying from Raid to Raid. (100GB 7200 WD drives)
What can mislead is SiSoftSandra, but my personal impression now without Raid is different.

@ Cybergen.


I have a very important point for you. I always keep my 2 optical drives on the same channel, and never make coasters. the important thing to not eit simply do not use on the fl copying. Thats it. Without on the fly, it will make a temporary image to the HD before burning. it wil only add a couple extra minutes to a disk to disk copy.

This frees up the other chanels without mixing CD and EIDE drives.

@ Alecstaar.

This ramdisk card. Is it treated as a scsi device, with a scsi drive attached in device manager?

If not, what is it treated as?
And does it not flood the pci to capacity, without seeing close to the rams otherwise potential? ON this point what im suggesting is, if this device had ,loaded on it the cheapest pc66/100/133 sdram, the Ram would still be WAY WAYfaster than the pci bus?

I would expect with this type of scenerio that these cards could potentially be CHEAP.......

I have had CDRW and CDROM on the same channel and had no problems as well. However with this particular CDRW i have noticed more errors and a few coasters. Once separated they seem to work fine. I can do On the Fly copying with it on the second channel so no problems there either.

I am already looking into getting 10K RPM drives to replace the ones on my array. This would take away the worry about swap file as data would come much faster.

if your CDRW is not Burnproof you will get buffer underrun err when copying CD to CD.
but if you hae your two CDROM drives on seperate channels, then there is no proplem. leave your CDRW drive alone on one channel.

on my system i have my 48X CDRW drive on a high-density cable as primary master and i can burn at 42X to 48X with no problems, even if i'm running other applications in the background or watching a movie (DVD rom is on scondary-master).

I also have no performence lacks when it comes to windows and applications. I have Raid0 and 2x 80GB 2mb 7200 udma 133 hdd's.