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I'm recently setting up a new computer and was trying to decide if I should set up RAID 1 on my computer.
My setup has a small (240gb) SSD for Windows and maybe one or two games I play most often, but I know the space won't last long if I put everything on it. So I am planning on getting a 2TB HDD as well or considering 2x 2TB HDD in RAID 1. This is where I am planning on installing the majority of my games.
Is RAID 1 a good idea in terms of the performance of gaming? Will there be issues doing it this way?
I've heard that RAID 1 has performance improvements the more drives you have. But I have also heard that there are performance hits as well, so I'm not sure what to think. I wasn't planning on getting a dedicated RAID controller and was just planning on letting the mobo (B350M M-ATX, the specs says it supports RAID 0/1/10) do the work, however, I've heard that some mobos don't handle RAID well which is what leads to the performance drops.
So I'm not sure if RAID 1 will be worth it.
I'm looking at RAID partially for the data redundancy in case of hardware failure but partially for the supposed performance improvements.
thanks for your answer. Is there any chance of a RAID 1 setup being worse, performance wise, than a single HDD? I don't mind RAID1 being about equal performance to a single HDD if I get the added benefit of redundancy. But if it's going to negatively impact gaming then I will likely not use RAID at all. – Aequitas – 2019-10-29T06:10:45.583
You have two devices sharing the same link (PCIe to SATA controller), so requests could experience sligltly larger delays. A bus saturation is impossible, because two HDDs are not enough (SATA controller often sits on PCIe 3.0 x4, which is roughly 4GB/s). Overall performance could be /slightly/ worse, unnoticeably and you shouldn't concern with that. Treat is as equal performance. See aslo https://superuser.com/questions/1218199/raid-1-vs-single-drive
– Nikita Kipriyanov – 2019-10-29T06:24:56.577yeah I’ve read a bit on the topic, but there’s little information specifically about the impact on gaming. Thanks again for your advice. – Aequitas – 2019-10-29T08:02:45.343