StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I currently have 3 HDs, two in my system, and one that I've repo'ed from another machine. The repo'ed HD and one of the HDs in my system are Hitachi Deskstars, SATA2 with 250 GB and an 8 MB buffer. I currently use the Deskstar for data (documents, downloads, etc.).

Would be worth putting the two Hitachi into a RAID 0 and using them as a game drive? Mainly, I'm getting tired of 'hitching' in Oblivion as it streams in a new area (a problem made worse by the texture and LOD mods I have), and I'm weighing this as a possible solution. The other HD (320 GB Seagate) would be not be in the RAID, and continue to be my OS disk, with the games moving off and the data moving on.

Possibly. How much RAM do you have?

Depends on whether or not the risks are worth it. If one of your RAID drives goes down, you lose everything. So if one of them is on the old side and less than reliable, I'd be wary about doing it.

Dominus Atheos wrote:Possibly. How much RAM do you have?

2GB.

General Zod wrote: Depends on whether or not the risks are worth it. If one of your RAID drives goes down, you lose everything. So if one of them is on the old side and less than reliable, I'd be wary about doing it.

The only thing that would be on them would be game files - no big loss if one goes down. Both drives are a little over a year old, and one has a couple more months usage than the other.

That's not that bad of an idea, but only if you're sure that your problem is sequential read access being too slow.

Would be worth putting the two Hitachi into a RAID 0 and using them as a game drive?

It is very unlikely you would see appreciable performance gains. Anandtech did an article on RAID-0 and concluded that it is worthless for the vast, vast majority of desktop users, including gamers.

Are there Oblivion users who do not experience hitching? (I don't play it so I don't know.) It could be that it's an unavoidable aspect of gameplay.

Uraniun235 wrote:Are there Oblivion users who do not experience hitching? (I don't play it so I don't know.) It could be that it's an unavoidable aspect of gameplay.

I don't know. The hitching occurs when a new area is 'streamed' into memory as you move through the world. Basically, as you move through the current group of loaded cells you'll hit a trigger point that causes the next group of cells in your path to load, all at once (its not a true streaming system). When you've got all the details cranked, plus a few of high detail mods loaded, the HD access goes nuts for a few seconds, and the frame rate drops through the floor for the same period of time. You can even use the debug display in the game's to console to watch it queue stuff up to load. And as soon as its done loading, everything runs smooth again. And defragging definitely helps.

If RAID would give a decent boost to read performance, I'd do it. But if its not, I'm not going to waste the time. What Bethesda really needs is implement a true streaming system where individual cells are constantly loaded; that should give a much smoother experience. But I doubt that'll happen until the next full game in the series.

RAIDing on the PC scale is always a little iffy, especially in the windows enviroment. Not that its necessarily unstable, just that the benefits are often mostly theoretical unless you are contently working with MASSIVE files (like massive IO such as video editing or something)...

Uraniun235 wrote:It is very unlikely you would see appreciable performance gains. Anandtech did an article on RAID-0 and concluded that it is worthless for the vast, vast majority of desktop users, including gamers.

I found that article. RAID definitely isn't worth it.

Arrow wrote:

Uraniun235 wrote:It is very unlikely you would see appreciable performance gains. Anandtech did an article on RAID-0 and concluded that it is worthless for the vast, vast majority of desktop users, including gamers.

I found that article. RAID definitely isn't worth it.

I suggest either some fast drives(150GB Raptors?) or making sure your HDs are set up in an optimised fashion(page file on seperate physical drive, defragged) and have 16MB on-HD cache. That helps.