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My main gaming PC is currently using a pair of Western Digital 320GB hard drives in a RAID 0 setup. I have had these since about 2007 and I believe either they or their RAID controller to be on its last legs - I am experiencing severe stutters in various games, which seem independant of CPU/GPU (both run at very comfortable temperatures, and their activity zeroes out during the stutters).

Firstly, is there any tool that will allow me to determine whether the problem lies with the drives themselves or the motherboard RAID controller? SMART monitoring of the drives claims that all is healthy, but I have heard that's not very reliable. Obviously I could break the disks up and test them individually in non-RAID config, but that's going to be a bit laborious.

Secondly if the drives are at fault, what are good brands of HDDs at the moment? I have almost always gone Western Digital, but have heard bad things about them recently. For the actual setup I would probably do RAID 0 again with 2 x 250 GB drives, as I never filled my 2 x 320 GB drives and there is a performance penalty for larger drives (is this actually true?). Any idea how much improvement am I likely to see going to 10,000 rpm drives? What else should I look for to give good gaming performance with HDDs?

Any help appreciated.

Laughing Mechanicus wrote:My main gaming PC is currently using a pair of Western Digital 320GB hard drives in a RAID 0 setup. I have had these since about 2007 and I believe either they or their RAID controller to be on its last legs - I am experiencing severe stutters in various games, which seem independant of CPU/GPU (both run at very comfortable temperatures, and their activity zeroes out during the stutters).

You can try WD's Data Lifeguard.

Firstly, is there any tool that will allow me to determine whether the problem lies with the drives themselves or the motherboard RAID controller? SMART monitoring of the drives claims that all is healthy, but I have heard that's not very reliable. Obviously I could break the disks up and test them individually in non-RAID config, but that's going to be a bit laborious.

Motherboard RAID tends to be lousy, even Intel's implementation.

Secondly if the drives are at fault, what are good brands of HDDs at the moment? I have almost always gone Western Digital, but have heard bad things about them recently. For the actual setup I would probably do RAID 0 again with 2 x 250 GB drives, as I never filled my 2 x 320 GB drives and there is a performance penalty for larger drives (is this actually true?). Any idea how much improvement am I likely to see going to 10,000 rpm drives? What else should I look for to give good gaming performance with HDDs?

Larger drives are faster. 10K drives are very fast. Hybrid drives are also fast (e.g. Seagate Momentus XT). SSDs are stupendously fast. Any hard drive you choose (of 7200RPM or faster) is fast enough for gaming.

Don't do RAID-0.

Thanks for the reply, and particular for pointing out those hybrid drives; I hadn't heard of those before but will investigate them as an option now.

Why the dislike of RAID 0? It's not something you would put valuable data on, but what's wrong with it for just storing the operating system and games? My current RAID 0 has lasted about 3 years, until this of course.

Why bother with RAID when you can just get a bigger hard disk? Terabyte drives aren't that expensive anymore.

My understanding was the advantage of RAID 0 was not the size increase, but the improved seek speed due to essentially having two disks able to simultaneously read off the one file system.

RAID-0 is fine as long as you have a daily back-up to something more reliable (ideally full-disk image). I wouldn't use it without an automatic back-up, even for just OS/programs reinstalling all my programs and settings would take a day or more.

That said an SSD OS disk + HD bulk data disk is vastly better for performance than two HDs in RAID 0. SSDs are getting pretty cheap now...

My understanding was the advantage of RAID 0 was not the size increase, but the improved seek speed due to essentially having two disks able to simultaneously read off the one file system.

Seek time decreases require a decent RAID controller, with a cheap and nasty motherboard controller you're only likely to get a bandwidth increase (usually substantially less than 100%). Seek time of eight enterprise 15,000 RPM hard drives in RAID-0 on a shit-hot controller is still over ten times that of an entry-level SSD.

Laughing Mechanicus wrote:My understanding was the advantage of RAID 0 was not the size increase, but the improved seek speed due to essentially having two disks able to simultaneously read off the one file system.

The improved speed simply doesn't seem worth the trade-off in reliability. If just one drive develops a problem you're fucked.

Speed advantage is negligible. The four seconds you wont save on loading a game into RAM is not worth the price of quadrupling your risk of system failure.

If you want to get hard about fast loading, get an SSD for gaming and a WD Caviar Green for misc. data storage.

Joviwan wrote:Speed advantage is negligible. The four seconds you wont save on loading a game into RAM is not worth the price of quadrupling your risk of system failure.

Are you saying my RAID-0 array of four 100 GB SSDs is not a sound investment?

I'm sure your four computer games load really fast. =P

Starglider wrote:Are you saying my RAID-0 array of four 100 GB SSDs is not a sound investment?

RAID-0 ramdrive instead?

Joviwan wrote:I'm sure your four computer games load really fast. =P

Loading a 30 GB database image to RAM still takes most of a minute, enough to be annoying during development (currently I am running in memory-only mode; prioritised on-demand mode doesn't work with the GPU compute code yet). HDs would just be intolerable.

30 GB database images? Man, talk about comparing Apples to Orangutans. There's a difference between that sort of productivity necessity and fast loading computer games.

I'm sure it's a lovely investment in the context of what you use it for. But come on, dude. You have to admit that it's completely superfluous for the OP.

Joviwan wrote:But come on, dude. You have to admit that it's completely superfluous for the OP.

I know, I just like to tease phongn. For a genuinely excessive workstation RAID setup see here; same motherboard as mine, but 16 x 80 GB SSDs in the primary (RAID-0!) array and 6 x 1 TB drives in the secondary array.

Starglider wrote:I know, I just like to tease phongn. For a genuinely excessive workstation RAID setup see here; same motherboard as mine, but 16 x 80 GB SSDs in the primary (RAID-0!) array and 6 x 1 TB drives in the secondary array.

Obviously you know what you're doing and when to choose RAID-0 (and when not to). The boys on Anandtech were benchmarking crazy things like six-disk SLC RAID-10 (store) + two-disk SLC RAID-0 (log) database configurations and such.

Reading a few reviews those hybrid drives do seem like a good solution for what I want, they give a decent performance boost without over the top cost. I have one question though: they are only available in 2.5 inch laptop form factor so is there any reason to avoid them for a desktop PC (heat maybe?) or with an mounting adapter kit will it just not matter? Also they do cap at 500 GB but that's fine for my games machine, all my files and media are kept on a 1 TB NAS.

Heat isn't really a problem; hard disks are actually the only computer component that performs better when warm (bearing life is extended at 40 degrees C vs 20 degrees C due to higher oil viscosity - Google did a study on this). 2.5" HDDs have a slightly worse cost/gigabyte than 3.5" HDDs, but since you have a separate bulk storage solution it won't be an issue.

Starglider wrote:Heat isn't really a problem; hard disks are actually the only computer component that performs better when warm (bearing life is extended at 40 degrees C vs 20 degrees C due to higher oil viscosity - Google did a study on this).

Yep, now that most (all?) drives use fluid bearings. With ball bearings it was quite different. However, there are probably limits even to that effect. I wouldn't risk running my HD's at higher than 50 °C.