Raptor or RAID 0?

Ok, so I'll be building my new PC soon-ish. I was just wondering from anyone who might know how loading times from a 10000rpm HDD compare to 2 7200rpm HDDs in RAID 0?

If the Raptor would boot Windows and load games faster then I'd probably go for a 74GB Raptor then a 500GB secondary drive. Otherwise I'm looking at 2 500GB in RAID 0. Any thoughts?

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The difference really will be very minor. Certainly not enough to justify the enormous price differences between the two. 10,000RPM drives are really better suited to people doing a LOT of video work. Your average home or business user has no need for such things, and that's evidenced by the ridiculous prices of such drives.

Personally, I wouldn't even bother with RAID 0. Can't think of ANY average home user that would need such a configuration really...

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@FloatingFatMan

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Why settle for one of the older Raptor drives? Get a VelociRaptor instead.

If you need a storage drive I can recommend the Samsung 1TB drive. It's quite fast for such a large drive (As in, it beats a RaptorX)

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Otherwise I'm looking at 2 500GB in RAID 0. Any thoughts?

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A 1Tb RAID 0 setup is begging for trouble. If you really want to lose that much data, then by all means, go ahead, but embedded RAID controllers on consumer motherboard are almost always cheap and/or nasty and likely to lead to array failures or at least errors, which with RAID 0 usually means total data loss.

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Otherwise I'm looking at 2 500GB in RAID 0. Any thoughts?

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A 1Tb RAID 0 setup is begging for trouble. If you really want to lose that much data, then by all means, go ahead, but embedded RAID controllers on consumer motherboard are almost always cheap and/or nasty and likely to lead to array failures or at least errors, which with RAID 0 usually means total data loss.

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Thanks for the warning - guess I'll just go for a single HDD then.

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Otherwise I'm looking at 2 500GB in RAID 0. Any thoughts?

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A 1Tb RAID 0 setup is begging for trouble. If you really want to lose that much data, then by all means, go ahead, but embedded RAID controllers on consumer motherboard are almost always cheap and/or nasty and likely to lead to array failures or at least errors, which with RAID 0 usually means total data loss.

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True. You could get the same behaviour as the RAID 0 system - with much less setup hassle - if you buy a single 1TB drive and hit it with a hammer occasionally.

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Raptor in my opinion.I am well satisfied with Raptor i use although i havent tried Raid 0 configuration.

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I used a RAID 0 awhile back. I go ahold of a controller card for cheap money and i had two identcal harddrive before so i decided to give it a try. Not *too* hard to setup, the manual was pretty easy to understand. Worked fien some 6-months or so, then one harddrive failed, and i lost so much data i actually cried a little... my screenshot collection from my everquest days with over 4000 screenshots catalogized >< Also lost my collection of fantasy art i had downloaded over severals years off the internet on a [censored] dial up connection, was over 1000 art pieces ><

So from now on i'm not touching RAID 0 with a ten foot pole!

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RAID 0 is highly dangerous due to its configuration. Plus raptors as good as they are won't benefit as FFM mentioned they are for people doing very high data throughput like video/audio production. It'd be safer to just have 2 drives and have one for ya installation and one to hoard ya data. I'm actually more surprised anyone uses RAID 0 due to its huge flaws. But I think sapphic's post above shows why not to have RAID 0 the best.

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RAID 0 is very good for systems that need to use more data than you have RAM for, with very high data rates. If you need a fast workspace or swap area, use RAID 0.

RAID 0 is lousy for long term storage or system files. Do not use it for those purposes.

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You may consider a solid state drive as an alternative. They're generally a lot faster than spinning media (edit: for reading; writing speed is generally similar or lower), although they cost a lot more.

If you have an OS that supports it, you may also consider a hybrid drive (ie a hard drive with a non-volatile RAM cache/buffer). Not all OSes support hybrid drives though.

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Still @Shadow Kitty

"I became Archvillain before Statesman nerfed himself!"

I've never found any of the alleged Raid systems on PCs to be up to much. As FFM mentioned they are too flaky to be reliable. As others have mentioned, 2 drives, one for OS, one for Data and use something like Ghost/Acronis for backup/restore

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