Quote:
Originally Posted by Coys1882
could someone quickly tell me what exactly running in RAID is and does?
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Using two drives as an example:
RAID-0 is striping - the first block of data goes on drive 1, then the next block goes on drive 2, then the third block on drive 1, etc, alternating. So your read and write performance is roughly doubled, since you aren't waiting on the drive to issue the next read or write command, and you are using two data channels simultaneously.
RAID-1 is mirroring - the same data gets written to both drives. Reads can come from either drive. So when writing, your performance is about the same as a single drive (or a little bit slower), but if a drive fails you can continue to run on the surviving drive. Reads are roughly twice as fast - since you can read the same data from either drive, the system alternates reads from each drive without having to wait.
There are other forms of RAID, but those are the two common ones in a desktop scenario. RAID-1 isn't as valuable using SSD drives, since the odds of drive failure are much lower to start with, and absolute system uptime is rarely a requirement. But RAID-0 flies, and since you are addressing the absolute slowest part of any machine build (disk I/O), it's a bigger upgrade than any amount of RAM, CPU, or video card will make (within reason of course - the video card is obviously highly important to gamers looking for framerates)