My trio of Samsung Spinpoint F3s (triplets! :)) arrived in the mail yesterday, and needless to say, I was super excited to put them into my rig right away and configure a 2 TB RAID 0 (known as striping) as my boot volume. The whole thing went very smoothly; save for a few hiccups when I tried to load up the RAID drivers, I was able to install a fresh copy of Windows 7 in half an hour. My current set up is a pair of F3s in RAID 0 (boot volume), and two separate 1TB drives (the 3rd F3, and my original WD Black) as pseudo storage/back-up drives. I originally thought about doing a RAID 1 (mirroring) with my two remaining drives, but then realized it was overkill, especially since I don’t need the redundancy at the moment. I am, of course, making regular backups of my boot volume, since RAID 0 is more prone to failure (if one drive in a RAID 0 setup fails, ALL the data is lost). My rationale for opting for the 3 F3s instead of, say, a SSD is mainly price. Sure, I could have gotten a 60 GB or maybe even an 120 GB SSD for around the same price, but the Price per Gigabyte for and SSD is still ridiculously high at this point. I’d rather take 3 TB of storage capacity for now and wait until SSD technology further improves and prices begin to drop. I also couldn’t bring myself to spend about the same amount of money for one WD 300GB velociraptor. And plus, I wanted to play around with RAID :D.

I’m including a screenshot of a disk benchmark I conducted in EVEREST, comparing my RAID 0 setup with my F3 and WD. Needless to say, the average performance for the RAID volume is significantly better than the single drives (I’m consistently getting 2oo+ MB/s read averages). In fact the figures are about double the single F3 benchmarks (save for the buffered read), which is to be expected. On the whole, these improved times haven’t been too noticeable. My bootup is about the same (maybe 1 or 2 seconds faster?) Programs seem to run snappier though, with Photoshop CS5 loading up in seconds (would take at least 10 on my older computers). File copying (where RAID 0 excels) has also sped up noticeably. I haven’t installed all my games yet, but I’m interested to see if there are any noticeable improvements in that area…I’ve heard the main perks of a RAID 0 setup is faster loading times. I think this is a significant advantage for people who play intensive online FPS games. The half second you gain from a “faster” (less-laggy) respawn may make a difference in performance!

(click for larger image)