Hard Drive Advice

[Ookami.kun]

Looking for a little advice since I'm going to be upgrading my system in the next few months.

Currently I have a 4.5 year old i7 X58 system running windows off a Samsung 128GB 830 SSD. Along with it I have a Samsung F3 3.0GB 1TB HDD for games and other applications.
I'm looking to upgrade to an Ivy Bridge system (i5 or i7, still not sure which) and I want to add another 1TB drive and RAID0 it with the current drive I have for more storage and faster response.

My question is, will there be any major bottle necking if I pick up a 6.0Gb/s SATAIII drive and RAID0 it with the current 3.0Gb/s, or should I just get a new 3.0Gb/s drive? Another option is getting two 6.0Gb/s for this if upgrading my HDDs to 6.0Gb/s will help with performance since the boards I've looked at have nothing but 6.0Gb/s ports. Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks.

[vesseblah]

Data comes out from HDD's platter at SATA1 speed into the controller chip on the drive. Only the link between HDD controller and motherboard runs at SATA2 or SATA3 speed. Or to put it simple, you'll never see any difference between SATA1, SATA2 and SATA3 HDD in daily use.

Would not bother with RAID0 on your HDDs at all. Put things that need speed into the SSD, including the few games you're playing, and everything else on HDDs. SATA2 Samsung Spinpoint F3 is fast enough for anything you need large storage for.

[Deleted]

FYI you won't get faster response with raid0... But it might just be that I missunderstand your words and confuse two different things, responsivness and bandwith.

Anyways I don't think that will be a problem since HDD speeds hasn't surpassed the old sataII in terms of bandwith. So it won't matter if it's sataII or sataIII, you'll get practicly a little better speed out of sataIII. The sataIII HDD's has 4kb sectors on their platters (I'm not sure, but I think all sataIII disks have it) as opposed to for instance your F3 who only have 512B.
The reason the F3 had good performance for it's time is that it had 2 platters design and ofc 7200rpm.

But I gotta ask, why not get another ssd if you're looking for performance? You can get a descent 120gb ssd for a reasonable price nowadays or maybe you actually need 1tb of space then nevermind (:

[traen]

You won't get any decent speed increase with builtin raid controller.

I tried several setups and I was not satisfied with results. Much higher response times - crucial for gaming. Not so big read/write speed increase. But in the same time much more cpu/memory usage.

Its good for storage purposes if you don't care about safety of your data. Slightly faster copy time and more storage space for your favourite anime/porn folder.

But not for gaming. You'll see loading time increase and the game will feel more laggy.

The best solution for game HDD is either SSD or RAMdisk.
If you still want to use raid controller, you need standalone hardware raid controller with at least 256 ram on board.