I have the following harddrives1) Maxtor D740X 60 Gb IDE U-133 purchased April 2002. Here I have Win XP home2) Seagate Barracuda IDE 7200.10 250 Gb ATA/100 purchased recently3) Two Western Digital RE-2 160 Gb SATA/300 16 Mb connected to a Lycom Raid Sata 2-Port PCI card and setup as raid 0 disc.I have tried to have games and FS9 on both the Seagate and the raid and got these unexpected loading times in seconds The Seagate The raidOblivioncontinue last game 13 sec 19 secStart FS 46 sec 51 secFalcon allied force 19 sec 20 secLoad a flight in FS 79 sec 56 secI would expect the raid to be faster. I loaded a flight in KHIO with UT USA GE Pro and Flight scenery Portland and the Carenado 182RG with RXP gauges. One thing I remember is that prior to this setup I got about 10 seconds for Falcon when I had everything on the raid and connected it to the built in mb SATA controller. Why seems the raid be somewhat slower except when loading a flight from FS? What is the most optimal way to use these discs?

RAID is only going to be faster if you are working with large files (i.e 4GB video files etc..). RAID as a performance boost for gaming does not work. However RAID looks great in a synthetic bechmarks though.

>RAID is only going to be faster if you are working with large>files (i.e 4GB video files etc..). RAID as a performance>boost for gaming does not work. However RAID looks great in a>synthetic bechmarks though.But I have heard that it's never slower.

It might depend on stripe size. From what I've seen RAID0 is good in a high write environment, such as a database, not not so great in a read-only environment.scott s..

I tested it, and in my opinion, overall experience shows me that it's slower than normal 7200rpm drive. Now, nobody is holding you off from testing :)Have fun.

As said, benefits of RAID are only really seen outside of benchmarks when dealing with the transfer of large files.Certainly in the case of FS where numerous small files are constantly being loaded the potential extra seek times caused by multiple drives over a single can cause detrimental effects.If you are working with large photo or video files RAID 0 is excellent, otherwise, stick with single drives.

Disks have a seek time, start of reading, and then a read rate.2 disks in raid have seek, synchronization, initialization , thenstart reading stripes. This works well where the files are large since the main componentis the read of data which is essentially twice as fast since theread process is very slow compared to all other processes. If you have small files (I have 90,000 files in FS9 - mostlytextures which are quite small), then you get a big hit on theslowest seek, synchronization, initialization step. Sorry, but Iwould expect raid to be slower than a single equivalent disk.Don't use raid for FS9/X. Use your fastest disk as a separate disk for only for FS + addon. Use another disk for paging andall your other programs - unless you have lots of disks then itmight be worth have a dedicated fast disk for the page file. SATAis the interface type - and is much faster than PATA - certainlyand advantage for FS due to the speed of the burst cache.Tom

>I tested it, and in my opinion, overall experience shows me>that it's slower than normal 7200rpm drive. Now, nobody is>holding you off from testing :)>And more testing I needed to do. The raid array failed so I have tested to disconnect all drives except the Maxtor with the OS and one of the WD RE discs. The WD supports says that using these raid designed disc as single would make them slower.My result is that I got the same loading time as when I used them in array setup. I sent a mail to the WD support to ask why this could possible.

>If you are working with large photo or video files RAID 0 is>excellent, otherwise, stick with single drives.I would had it not been for the fact that these RE disc are designed to be used only in raid setup and it's explicitely advised against using them as siongle discs. And unfortunately the reseller is reluctant to replace them with other drives.

I wonder if it's slower because it's a PCI raid set up and not direct to MOBO, ie is the PCI bus speed faster or slower than the MOBO bus speed?

>I wonder if it's slower because it's a PCI raid set up and>not direct to MOBO, ie is the PCI bus speed faster or slower>than the MOBO bus speed?For me there seems to be no difference beyween raid PCI and MOBO single disc.