if i have a 7200 RPM HDD

RAID 0 will improve read and write performance. The HDD is in itself a huge bottleneck, so no - making a RAID 0 will not bottlenet your PC.

mine are seagate barracuda 7200.10

but i'm sure other drives are fine too

and just so you know, my 60% number isn't just a made up number. i measured before and after with HD Tune

i am getting an external drive that i will have all my important stuff backed up on.Jdbucc

have you ever actually lost your information using raid?Jdbucc

my computer came with 2 drives in raid 1. that's where the drives are copies of eachother. it's cool, but i didn't really need it. so i broke the raid and had 2 independent drives.

later i learned how raid 0 could speed things up by making the drives work together. i figured i'd try it. what's really cool is i used intel matrix storage manager console and it let me migrate to raid 0 without losing any data. but to do this, you need a lot of free space on the drives. also, this is done from within windows, not the bios.

another cool thing, is that with just 2 drives, you could do raid 0 and raid 1 on them at the same time...like half of the disk space could be used for raid 0 and the other half raid 1. i don't do that, but i've read about it. this might just be available for intel raids..i'm not sure.

mine are seagate barracuda 7200.10

but i'm sure other drives are fine too

and just so you know, my 60% number isn't just a made up number. i measured before and after with HD Tune

rock_solid

[QUOTE="rock_solid"]

mine are seagate barracuda 7200.10

but i'm sure other drives are fine too

and just so you know, my 60% number isn't just a made up number. i measured before and after with HD Tune

Captain__Tripps

Yeah, but it makes little difference but makes you far more likely to lose all your data, was just pointing that out. Even if you have data backed up still a pain losing your OS drive, unless you are also doing image backups which most people don't bother with. Captain__Tripps

here is what im thinking small hard drive for OS (just enough to boot basically) Raid 0 for games etc (1 - 2 TB) external drive for important filesJdbucc

[QUOTE="rock_solid"]

mine are seagate barracuda 7200.10

but i'm sure other drives are fine too

and just so you know, my 60% number isn't just a made up number. i measured before and after with HD Tune

Captain__Tripps

[QUOTE="Captain__Tripps"][QUOTE="rock_solid"]

mine are seagate barracuda 7200.10

but i'm sure other drives are fine too

and just so you know, my 60% number isn't just a made up number. i measured before and after with HD Tune

opamando

[QUOTE="JigglyWiggly_"][QUOTE="opamando"] I guess technically it doubles your chance of loosing information, but I look at it the same way as how buying 2 lottery tickets doubles your chances of winning. I feel people should keep their information backed up regardless of RAID. Captain__Tripps

So what is the difference if the single hard drive you get is the one that is going to go in RAID, that is why I said it is like the lottery in doubling your chances.

The way I see it is yes, hard drives are all going to die, it is just a question of is it in 2 weeks or 2 decades. So why not just backup your important information and run as many hard drives in RAID as you can?

[QUOTE="Captain__Tripps"][QUOTE="JigglyWiggly_"] Except there is a much higher chance of a hard drive failing.opamando

So what is the difference if the single hard drive you get is the one that is going to go in RAID, that is why I said it is like the lottery in doubling your chances.

The way I see it is yes, hard drives are all going to die, it is just a question of is it in 2 weeks or 2 decades. So why not just backup your important information and run as many hard drives in RAID as you can?