SAS RAIDs and high-performance gaming?

[Bino]

Doesn't RAID 0 only benefit read times? Writes are all the same on every drive, thus no speed gain for writing as compared to striped setups.

Unless I've read these things wrong? I am new to RAIDs, and outside of casual interest have never looked into setting one up before.

RAID-0 is striped.  RAID-1 is mirrored.  

Because you *might* end up with a relatively large number of bytes in a single stripe on a RAID-0 array, you *might* not have to move the read/write heads as much or as often as on a plain HDD.  So, depending on how you use it, a RAID-0 array *might* be a bit faster than a plain HDD, potentially on both reads and writes.

Depending on how well written the RAID code is, you *might* end up with slightly better read performance on a RAID-1 mirrored array than a plain HDD, *if* the RAID chip/card is smart enough to serve up data to the OS from the first mirrored disk that answers it's data request.

And most RAID add-in cards have at least some on-board RAM for cache, too.

YMMV, and by quite a bit!  

[katanaso]

I haven't had experience with RAID cards, but I've used RAID0 on my Asus board for 4 straight years, same drives but I don't chance them.  Back up back up on multiple formats.

I had a RAID 0 array on a home PC at one point when digital audio recording was just getting popular for the PC platform (think when Celeron 300A's were the chip to OC).  It was the cheapest bang for the buck, but I lost a drive when my UPS failed a power spike. 

That was the last time I went with RAID 0 at home. 

I'm a huge fan of backups.

[2bighorn]

Depending on how well written the RAID code is, you *might* end up with slightly better performance on a RAID-1 mirrored array than a plain HDD, *if* the RAID chip/card is smart enough to serve up data to the OS from the first mirrored disk that answers it's data request.

On simple RAID 1 writes are usually few percent points slower than single HDD, reads a few percent faster. Top RAID 1 implementations would increase reads anywhere between 30 to 50 percent, but that's rare.

The only thing which almost double the reads in RAID 1 is having two cards in duplexing mode. Writes would still be the same as for single HDD.

[Bino]

On simple RAID 1 writes are usually few percent points slower than single HDD, reads a few percent faster. Top RAID 1 implementations would increase reads anywhere between 30 to 50 percent, but that's rare.

The only thing which almost double the reads in RAID 1 is having two cards in duplexing mode. Writes would still be the same as for single HDD.

Good point about running (well-written, smart) duplex RAID cards.