Building a machine

[Occhidiangela]

Thanks for the link, it expanded on the original RAID info I plucked from a few IT dictionary sites.

Don’t expect a lot of help here--the sIDE RAID66 and DPTA-372050s were only able to pull off a 19% increase in framerate over a single drive. The fact of the matter is, once a game is loaded it does not make heavy use of the hard disk, and when it does, it’s usually in short, random reads and writes rather than in the large sequential transfers where RAID excels.

On the other hand, the actual loading of the game will benefit greatly. Unfortunately there’s no real benchmark to illustrate it, but you will notice that Quake 3 maps and levels, and even the game itself, load much more quickly when using the RAID 0 array. If you’re looking to shave a couple seconds off of your load times, this is a way to do it.

I had figured as much, but since I don't mess with that kind of optimization as a matter of course, I was not sure what small detail I might be missing via simple lack of familiarity.

RAID: Nice to have feature if I decide to get into other aspects of the PC Hobby, and one that will necessitate identical HD's to get the most bang out of that buck. 4 HD's? Hmmm, if my kids want to make that much video, I think they will need to buy the drives themselves, and we will all need to buy a rather huge tower! Certainly bigger than what holds the current gaming machine.