Raid 0 or no?

[sean126]

I'm in the process of building and my main things are burning/copying dvd's and video editing things I've taken with my camcorder.

I have a raptor 150 for apps and a seagate 320 for storage. I was thinking of getting another raptor150 and making a raid 0. Would that cut down on my rendering times and by how much? 2 min, more than 5, more than 10 minutes off? Just want to get an idea of "is it really worth it". My specs are in my signature. What would decrease my times that's not going to shorten the life of the computer parts.

[Panda Man]

I doubt it, this will cut the access time to launch the apps you need, and possibly speed up access time for your videos, but the rendering (and encoding and such) is mostly dependent on the CPU, GPU and RAM, not the HDD

[sean126]

Thanks Panda man. If you or anyone else knows how to safely decrease my times (without alot of damage from oc'ing) feel free to speak up, because that's my main goal.

[gvblake22]

Panda Man is right, a faster processor and/or faster RAM is going to make more of a difference than a RAID 0 setup, even with two 150GB Raptors. It looks like you have a pretty nice system there already (very similar to mine actually!). I would take the $200 you would have spent on another 150GB Raptor and save it up for at least a few months and see what else comes along in the processor market. Intel's new Penryn processors, as well as AMD's native quad core "Phenom" processors are supposed to be released by the end of the year and may offer a reasonable enough performance improvement over your E6600 to warrant an upgrade. But until then, you've got a very fast system already and there really isn't much you can upgrade to help your situation at this point in time.

For now, you could try your hand at some overclocking and get that Conroe up to 3GHz or so and you will probably see a reasonable increase in encoding/decoding DVD's. Don't worry about damaging your system, as long as you keep things within a reasonable limit you should have no problems.

Here are some benchmarks for you to look over:

[sean126]

Thanks Pandaman and GV......considering I'm a new guy at building computers, I can understand those answers perfectly.

After I get it put together this week....I'll try to get answers on oc'ing the cpu and ram.

I ask questions on another website, the same questions actually. I wanted to explain before someone gets a bad opinion of me.

It's not a question of liking the answer that I get, but wether I can understand the explanation given to me. Different people explain things differently. Some use a step by step, hand holding explanation....others, not so much. I'm not hard headed by any means, sometimes I just don't understand the answer because it's not indepth enough and I feel bad about asking the same question over and over again. I know some people get tired of that, which I can understand.

I thought I should explain because another person seemed aggravated or irritated by the fact that I posted on two sites. I may have mistaken the reasons behind his remark though. Any-who, I don't know if theres any competition among the different forums, but I appreciate the help I've been getting.

[One4yu2c]

Speaking on our own behalf, we don't 'compete' with other forums and/or sites. We're in this to give would-be enthusiasts a place to ask questions and learn the basics without the fear of being flamed or told to "Google it!!" We welcome our readers to get more than one opinion on a product, recommendation, or other computer related question, and it's for this reason that we link other sites' reviews of a product at the end of each of our own reviews.

Not all sites share this same philosophy, and some do very much view it as a competition for readers and site hits. But as far as HL is concerned, feel free to post whatever you need help with, regardless if you've already done so on another site or not.

[gvblake22]

One4 is right on the money. We're not trying to compete with anyone, we just want happy members who might even feel the urge to stick around the forums and lend a helping hand where they feel comfortable. So don't be shy to ask for clarification or expansion on something or post the same question on another site because second opinions are always good.

[frenchie29]

I do video editing and just got a new built total I have 5 hd I was gonna put 2 on raid 0 but after some research I will leave that alone the reason why is if you have drive failure it's not the same as a single drive way much harder to recover so to me it's not worth the risk!!!!

[Hitman]

Raid 5 might be an option for you. There is redundancy, so if one drive fails not all is lost. Also RAID 5 uses less headroom then RAID 1. You only loose 1/3 of your total HD space instead of 1/2 with RAID 1. You do have to have at least 3 HDs to use RAID 5. If it were me I would put 4 HDs in RAID 5 and run one Single for your OS.