Thanks to Anand for posting yet another good look at Hitachi's upcoming 1TB drive. The best performing 7200rpm drive, however, gets no boost in reality from a RAID 0 setup.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2969

Let the analysis begin.......

nice review, thanx for the link

Damn. I just read that article and wanted to post it for all the AID0 lovers here. A quote if I may from the article. (page 9, second paragraph.)

Got it? Yes, AID0 is faster. The tests with AID0 finished 1-2 seconds faster then a non raid system. The problem for gamers is that the cost of the second drive would provide better benefits if it was put into a better CPU, GPU, ram, etc.

yet with teh low price of HDs, and the facts that faster is still faster... RAID0 still has its place in the enthusiast PC... not to mention that they are still nonetheless, quite reliable...
I have 6 HDs in my PC.

Right, but also with the sizes of the drives sprialing upward, backup becomes an issue. In all but a few cases, I would call it an unwarranted cost. Unless everything else in your computer is maxxed out, the money spent on a RAID0 array would yield much better results if spent on other components.

but hey... if you need to improve your boot time and PCMark05 benchmark scores then RAID 0 will certainly do that!

lol, not really, you get 4 cheap ass 80gb drives, say, $50 each, put them in raid 0, they perform better than a raptor, store more and are cheaper.

RAID 0 is bullshit from start to finish on the desktop. You've got to be a fucking idiot to implement it.

RAID 1 - sure - but 0 is a worthless piece of crap which will cause you to curse the day you decided to go with it.

You've been warned.

:? been running at least one RAID0 drive about 4 yrs now...

Then again, if you buy a TB HDD, I think you are buying it for storage more than speed.

Even if it is the fastest 7,200 RPM hard drive?

Then again, I can't fill a 200GB with useful data, as in stuff I would actually want, so TB means nothing to me.

So I'm an idiot because YOU say so? 8O... LMAO

I'll give you the PCMark05 benchmark, but I've never seen faster winxp startup from RAID0. My home system has two 160GB WDAAJS's in RAID0, and my gaming computer has a single 74GB ADFD raptor, and the raptor boots faster. The home system has a 6600, and the gaming system has a D805@3.8 (I know, time to upgrade the gaming machine). Both have 2Gb RAM. The Raptor system is noticibly faster, 3-4 seconds at least, never used a stop watch on it though.

That's the greatest thing about the new Hitatchi drive, not only is it hugemongous, it's damn fast too. Cheers to them for not sacrificing speed for capacity and actually delivering both. Sure, not everyone has a need for such a big drive, but I'm sure most people could find a use for it. Especially for HTPC's or, well, huge chunks of the stuff the internet is REALLY for.....

So I'm an idiot because YOU say so? 8O... LMAO

Count me in with idiots. You can buy a fast proc, overclock, tune your memory but if you try to find more speed in the slowest part of your system you're an idiot.

Most desktop users shouldn't overclock, most shouldn't water cool, most shouldn't buy fast ram etc., etc. I don't think many reading these forums are the average user.

AID0 is pretty much the LAST thing you should get for a build. Go look in the forum for people asking for build advice. Watch them talk about buying 2 harddrives, but only a 7900GS. They want to get AID0 up instead of buying the 6600 instead of the 6300. AID0 is what you buy when you're done building your system, quad core cpu, SLI/CF graphics, 2GB+ of high performance memory, etc. Once you have all that in your rig, then consider AID0. As long as someone is talking about buying a 7600GT/7900GS, I'm going to tell them to drop the AID0 idea.

I agree absolutely. Too many skimp on other, more critical components in favor of putting in an array that's not going to be noticibly faster in 95% of apps. Not only that, but when used as a system drive it's an invitation to disaster, unless you do 0+1, which is even more money.

If you've maxxed everything else out, then why not use it? It's not really going to hurt, but a gain of 1 or 2% isn't worth much in my book.

Gimme a break. I've been exclusively using stripes since you could hack a promise ata66 card to a fasttrack.

Used Promise FT 66, FT 100, FT 133, Intel ICH 5/7R, Various Silicon Image ATA and Sata Controllers, nForce 4, and now I'm using a ULi M1575.

I've never lost any data or drives. Never had to rebuild a stripe or copy data back from my backup drives.

Wah Wah I had a bad experience once. Get over it

I mostly agree with you here. Upgrades should be planned with a balanced approach.
I first became interested in Raid because of online gaming; specifically the BF series. I remember joining the game and only to see the planes and tanks roll out of the base. When BF2 came out the load times were huge. For a gamer you cannot underestimate the advantage 1-2 sec. in load time can give you. Anandtech did BF2 load time and typically showed a 1 sec. advantage. They tested offline load time which is must faster than online. Online does a client verification which is all hard drive access. In my experience being on TS comparing load time with other players, two decent hard drives in raid 0 are only beaten by two raptors. I don't play BF any more but in the hundreds of hours I played, Raid 0 gave me an unfair advantage. I would be in the air and across the map before 2/3rds of the players had joined.
That explains why I started using raid 0. I also feel that everything feels quicker but this is harder to prove or quantify. I hate load bars and hour glasses.