Well no practical benefits on DESKTOP PCs not servers obviously . The
article points out artificial benchmarks come out much better but not
real world use.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...tml?i=2101&p=1


Im flabbergasted because thats exactly what I posted before. Id read
it didnt make much difference and that benchmarks came out OK but not
a big difference in real world performance. This was long long ago.
But then as I posted in the other group I could swear that Id read an
Anandtech article later on recommending raid 0 for a desktop. And
several skeptics who used to make fun of the ATA 100-133 transition
as a marketing scam vociferously started defending RAID. And of course
zillions have touted it all over the newsgroups and at various
websites.

I thought I was out of date and that maybe the newer hard disks and
raid technoloigy had made it worthwhile. Hmmmmmmm, subjectively as I
posted - it "feels" snappier. This must be a really powerful mass
delusion or maybe Im reacting to very tiny differences.

Even now as I said - before I did it , a website tested it for gaming
and there was no gain in framerates etc but the one thing even
skeptics claimed was that things seemed to load faster. In this test
they even looked at game loading in FAR CRY and found virtually no
advantage and think increased chance of hardware problems doesnt make
it worth it at all.

Now heres my question - Anyone else feel a subjective improvement in
performance? And what kind of apps would have any kind of real world
benefit on a desktop?



Heres the conclusion from Anandtechs article:




Final Words

If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you:
there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop
computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best
and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time
between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

There are some exceptions, especially if you are running a particular
application that itself benefits considerably from a striped array,
and obviously, our comments do not apply to server-class IO of any
sort. But for the vast majority of desktop users and gamers alike,
save your money and stay away from RAID-0.

If you do insist on getting two drives, you are much better off
putting them into a RAID-1 array to have a live backup of your data.
The performance hit of RAID-1 is just as negligible as the performance
gains of RAID-0, but the improvement in reliability is
worthwhile...unless you're extremely unlucky and both of your drives
die at the exact same time.

When Intel introduced ICH5, and now with ICH6, they effectively
brought RAID to the mainstream, pushing many users finally to bite the
bullet and buy two hard drives for "added performance". While we
applaud Intel for bringing the technology to the mainstream, we'd
caution users out there to think twice before buying two expensive
Raptors or any other drive for performance reasons. Your system will
most likely run just as fast with only one drive, but if you have the
spare cash, a bit more reliability and peace of mind may be worth
setting up a RAID-1 array.

Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but
they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world
desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth.