Gaming [question]take advantage of dual hdd speeds (raid like)

[migles]

currently i have 1 500 GB hdd in my pc for the time being, and i just remember i have an old 1tb HDD that i used for backup but i don't use that one anymore, it's barely filled with stuff.

i can't invest on an ssd now, so i was thinking, if i have 2 drives maybe i could raid them and benefit in speed

i use Windows 10 (i use this pc mainly for gaming), so i guess there is no fancy filesystems for me

i was thinking in setting up a raid 0 but the fact if one of the drives fails scares me..
raid 0 was the best thing for me, because then i would have 1 huge logical drive and i don't need to deal with a drive C and drive D and deal with one drive getting full while the other is empty etc..

so, what's the best effective way to use 2 drives to counter the mechanical seeking times?

 

[FAST6191]

Raid 0 in your case would only give 500 gigs (less the usual formatting/partitioning/hard drive sizing). It would not be 1500 gigs of theoretically high performance.

Equally many make a bigger deal about single hard drive failures in raid 0 than I reckon they should. It is certainly true that one drive going down (or even dropping out of the array) will lose data and theoretically more moving parts, more chance of failure but if you treat it as one hard drive it is not going to be too much different than any old hard drive failing.

You know your way around a computer well enough if you are asking these questions. To that end what would probably speed you up the most is manually pointing the hard drive hogs at the appropriate drives.
Put your torrent client on the other drive and leave windows by itself. That way it is only the other drive involved in downloading, checking, repairing, extracting and whatever else.
If you are doing video make sure the source files are on one drive and the temp file/final render on the other.
If you can preload things into RAM then maybe consider it, if you have enough memory to do a RAM drive then even better.

For a system with unpredictable uses, or very specific uses a speed focused RAID can make sense. Likewise if you have money to burn when building a PC it is a more than cosmetic change, however for most I would just look at the hard drive hogs and think through things as you are doing it.

 

[migles]

Raid 0 in your case would only give 500 gigs

yeah, that's my main issue.. there will be 500gb unused
and i am wondering since both drives are not identical (i think they have the same rpm but they are from different brands) maybe raid would have poor performance...
i use mostly this for gaming..
since i am mostly interested in reading speed i could setup a raid 1 to act as a backup.. but then there was the issue of 500 GB unused again.. (and the fact if one drive fails it will corrupt the good drive)

i only have 8GB of ram, tested the asus cache thing allocated 2GB but i don't feel a difference, i had to stop it anyway, because i was getting low on ram

 

[Alkéryn]

You could program a controller in arduino to use both Hard drive in a kind of raid 0
Pro :
- You could plug them in a pc with one usb cable
- Any pc would see it as a regular Hard drive
Con :
- Some work to do
- It will only be 500 GB
- Would be a bit bulky (yeah the size of your 2 hardrives)