When I last reloaded my primary development computer I took a page from AtomicInternet and went ahead with a full blown Raid 0 setup for my primary drive.  Raid 0 spreads the data for each file across multiple drives in order to increase performance, the only drawback being if one of the drives fails you lose all of the data.  With a proper backup solution (such as Windows Home Server) the risk is greatly reduced and when doing a lot of compiles or gaming the performance is well worth it.  AtomicInternet had purchased two 300GB VelociRaptor drives, which netting him a very nice performance increase over his previous setup as shown below.


The VelociRaptor’s are a bit more expensive than I wanted to go ranging anywhere from $150 to $200 each. I found a deal on the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drives for $70 each and after reading a few reviews I was sold on them. I knew going in that the raid setup would be slower since I was going with 7200 rpm drives as compared to the VelociRaptor’s 10k but I was able to get 2TB instead of only 600GB as the tradeoff. The Nvidia raid setup couldn’t be easier and only took a few moments to setup before I had a fresh install of Windows 7 going.

I’ve run a few benchmarks but even with no tuning I’m seeing a great comparison against the VelociRaptor setup.  While it is not as fast it definately has a great bang for the buck.  Some of the numbers are a bit fishy, however, so I am going to ask AtomicInternet to rerun his benchmarks using some different software and I will do the same.  I am hoping for more consistant results, since HD Tune seems to be a bit buggy with some of the data.

Overall I am happy with the final result and compiles have never been faster.  When looking at the benchmark I noticed the dropoff at about the 50% point and I am unsure what causes that but AtomicInternet had the same issue with his 2-drive Raid 0 setup as well.  I will do some more digging into this and try and figure it out, if it does turn out that 4 drives makes a faster raid then perhaps I’ll just add two more of these drives — at $150 for both why not?