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#281
ciphernemo,
I have quite a bit of experience with RAID configurations. I'm a systems engineer for a living and have been building servers and running SAN/NAS devices (EMC and NetApp) with RAID 1, 5, 10, and 50 for a number of years. In fact, in the past month I have been troubleshooting a significant RAID performance issue on a VMWare ESXi 3.5 update 4 server on a HP Proliant DL360 Gen 5 server with 15,000 RPM 2.5" SAS Drives. Turned out to be an issue with the HP Smart Array P410i RAID controller and it's BBWC (battery backed write cache module)..or in this case...it's lack thereof. Thus, VMWare would not utilize any write caching whatsoever on the drive and instead held until the data was on the platters.
At home, prior to having SSD's and simply using the onboard RAID controllers on mobos (mostly software RAID), the benchmarks always returned higher numbers and straight up large file copies indeed verified in the increased performance....but the actual time differences noticed when booting my operating system or launching a game (games I tested at the time were BattleField 2, Half Life 2, and Doom 3) came back negligible. And as you noted, I was doing this with 1 single monitor at a smallish resolution of 1280x1024. Now, with file copies...the difference was very significant. You really saw it when you copied a 20GB virtual machine file from 1 folder to another for backup purposes. So, I've always maintained that I think for most PC users and even gaming enthusiasts, that RAID0 configs of the entire OS just hasn't been a wise choice. Especially in the last few years where drive capacities (of mechanical drives) seems to have increased rapidly, but with failure rates among manufacturers going up as well.
Again, I'm not criticizing, but looking for feedback on where things stand these days. Like I said, I wanted to see numbers. If your game load times went from 5 seconds to less than 1 second...that's significant.
Also, I'm certain you are aware but with some of the newer SSD's out there, like the Intel and OCZ...the stuttering problem with the original controllers has pretty much been solved. Unfortunately, the cost of these drives is quite a bit higher...naturally.
Again, sorry if it seemed like I was criticizing your choices. But to assume that I have no real-world experience with RAID and am otherwise misinformed, is simply not the case. And like I noted, you aren't running your OS's and such on the RAID 0 and that really helps in the event of a failure. Plus, you have unique monitor layouts that provide additional necessity for what you are running.
Thanks for taking the time and sharing your performance numbers.