Hi everyone. . .
I hate to post asking for help on technical matters here, because I really have done a fair amount of research myself on upgrading the hard drives in my current system. I’m kinda looking for the experience and opinions of others here, though.
Back in the 90s, I used to build systems all the time for practically everyone I knew, and made my living in PC service and support. . .but that was some time ago and I guess I’m just a little behind these days.
I built a new machine last year, primarily for gaming as I do all of my actual work on an old near-obsolete Inspiron that Ubuntu breathed new life into. Specs on the desktop are:
ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe mobo
AMD Athlon 64 FX-62
4x1GB Corsair XMS2 PC2 6400 SDRAM
BFG Tech 7950GX2
. . . and two hard drives I salvaged from my previous machine, an ASUS SK8N mobo with an FX-54 processor:
2x Seagate Barracuda ST3250823AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA150 HDDs in RAID 0
The desktop currently runs Vista, and I’ve been considering dual-booting it with Ubuntu 7.04 so I can play with apps that my laptop (running 6.06) isn’t quite beefy enough for, and while reading the FakeRaidHowTo at the ubuntuwiki (I think) I decided I was a little leery about trying to set up a dual-boot configuration on RAID 0.
First, a question about RAID 0. Back when I built the SK8N machine, RAID 0 was all the rage, but I have since read from time to time that the performance increase is not all that significant. I’m seriously wondering if I wouldn’t be better served just scrapping the RAID, getting a decent-sized HDD that supports SATA 3.0Gb/s and using that for Vista.
Then I could just take one of the existing 250GB SATA150 drives I have and install Ubuntu there. (I really don’t foresee myself needing any more than 250GB for it.)
Just wondering if any Dopers had an opinion here. I’m open to any suggestions. Would two SATA 3.0Gb/s drives in RAID 0 have a tremendous benefit over one larger one? My system is stable 99% of the time and I’ve never had any difficulty with the RAID. . .but on my old SK8N system I did have one crash that rendered the system unbootable and trashed the OS, so if my performance increase with RAID 0 isn’t that significant I’d sooner not bother with it.
I know this is probably not quite descriptive enough, and I’m not even certain if I’m asking the right questions. Any advice would be appreciated, though.
Thank you!