Right, I'm going to be installing vista soon and was wondering what everyone's opinion on RAID 0 was.

I was planning on doing this, but having read a few articles floating about on the net it seems that it wouldn't actually benefit me that much and I would be increasing the risk of data loss for a slight (if any) gain in performance.

I'm hoping that some of you wiser folk have experience about this and are able to help.

Cheers

I did have raid-0 a while ago but got rid. It was faster at loading maps in BF2 (they take ages) but not that much and it DOES increase risk.

Ideally if you can find a motherboard that can handle it well OR good value add-in card, go with Raid-5 (you want hardware XOR processing on it), you'll need 3 disks at least but you get speed and data security.

It's probably more sensible just to use a really fast HD to boot from and run games from (Maybe a 150gb Raptor), store your data on a cheap 500gb thing, Western Digital caviar are probably the best disks for this.

I agree with Mani on the Big Raptor option . Option 4 would be to go for RAID-0 + big back-up drive .

Personally I am paranoid about storage & run my OS & critical apps on a 74G Raptor , my games & storage on a couple of Maxtor's in RAID-0 & a big Maxtor to back up my storage .

One thing is for sure & that is when it comes to I/O RAID-0 is defiantly faster than a Raptor & the risks which people talk about are theoretical ones , in practice HDD's either fail very quickly or trundle on for years . My Maxtor's have been thrashing away for about three years now & they have shunted some serious data around my home network & I expect them to keep going for another three years at least .

personally I think that using raid to gain performance is not a good idea. The faster a drive is (spin speed)the higher the chance of a drive failure is.
But saying that as someone who manages a lot of servers all running raid (NOT 0) Ive never had a drive fail ever in a server.

I have had drives on my gaming PC fail but never instantly there is definatley a gradual deteriation and never a total instant failure. so i would'nt count the failure of a drive in the raid 0 equation ther is more chance of motherboard failure and many more things, but i do think that raid 0 is a falacy and out of date with current technology.

I personally dont run raid on my gaming rig but have the same performance.
I run my own custom setup to gain extra performance. It basically involves having your programs on one drive and your virtual memory on another. basically its too slow as you are reading and writing to the same drive down the same cable through the same controller when you have many controlles and drives.
This improves your performace without the risks of raid 0. I devised this set up in to play BF2 but it works in all aps on that drive. IF your virtual memory is on a seperate drive to windows, windows runs quicker. If apps are on a seperate physical drive they run faster. but most of your loading time in a game isnt the application but its windows caching.
so to summerise the best set up is to have 3 drives.
one with your OS on
one with your virtual memory and stored files like docs mp3's movies and downloads
one with your apps on

if you only have 2 drives then have apps and virtual memory on one and windows on the other.
if one drive is faster than another then the virtual memory drive should be the fastest

That is what i would recommend so basically dont raid 0 there is no point as the speed can be gained without the theoretical risks of losing everthing.

Also there are many ways to stop any caching to virtual memory if you have enough ram. I havent done this myself but a few of my m8s manipulate the virtual memory settings to make is so there isnt one at all forcing your os to cache to your ram.
Im sure there is a way to create a partition (ramdrive) that is virtual and that uses ram not a HDD is a dos floppy can do it then it cant be that hard. If i had the time i would do that as most machines these days have too much ram and would run perfactly ok with a 1gb ramdrive.. I actually fancy making this as ive been waiting for someone else ot do it for so long that i find it frustrating.
Im glad that you are all looking at this area of your PC as all the ram and cpu power int he world is nothing compared to your HDD performance, master this and the weakest PC can perform way above its weight.

Sent , the config you mentioned is common amongst video editing people . What OS are you using , just wondering if it will make a difference to me when I have Vista 64 + 4 gig of RAM . I thought caching to HD only impacts performance when you RAM out of RAM . Must look into this ...