RAID vs RAM

[15357]

Ok, so I've been wondering, would I get a better performance boost if I bought 4 more GB of RAM making mine 8GB, or a 1TB WD HDD and RAID it with my other HDD?

I mean, they cost the same. I hadn't heard about RAID until a few days ago, and I'm intrigued.

 

[giant384]

More ram will allow you to keep your pc on longer without slowdown and run programs more efficiently. Raid is only really useful if you are doing raid 5 for a home pc, other then that its a waste of money. You wont really notice the huge difference with 2 drives. Are you planning to mirror or strip them?

 

[Kyorisu]

More ram will allow you to keep your pc on longer without slowdown and run programs more efficiently.

Huh this makes no sense. I'm guessing what you meant is "More ram allows you to run more programs and well use more memory before hitting your pagefile which is dog slow." With 8GB of ram you could plop your pagefile onto a ram disk for programs that require a pagefile to exist.

You wont really notice the huge difference with 2 drives. Are you planning to mirror or strip them?

I'm running 2x WD black 640GBs in Raid 0, they laugh at single 7200rpm drives. 2x velociraptors are fast. Just the same I don't recommend it. Go and buy yourself a G.Skill Falcon II or equivalent SSD. For storage a Raid is only going to be useful if you get yourself a raid card and those things are expensive.

 

[Asus]

Do you ever have a lot of tabs open on your web browser (or windows). Or multi task a lot? or have stuff open while gaming? go for the 8gb ram.
The more ram you have the less chance your pagefile gets used. Although a program that needs a pagefile just needs it to exist. With enough ram, paging will be minimal. (regarding ram drive) Why take up ram space for a pagefile that rarely gets used? (well, it will get used more if you take away ram space). Unless you have 16gb ram and are far from peaking that high then you could definitely add a virtual ram drive.

Forget the raid all together. If you want a fast drive get a cheaper (40gb) SSD and put as your boot OS drive and have the 1TB as game, storage, downloads, documents drive. OR keep your 1TB as the boot/storage drive and put your games on the SSD.
Check out the RANDOM read/write graphs. SSDs are a lot better than normal drives here. You can barely see the VelociRaptor score.

 

[No Limit]

I've seen many people screw themselves when they set up raid but didn't know how to manage it. I would recommend you stay away from it. And to answer your question as everyone said more ram will give you a bigger performace increase assuming you are using a 64-bit operating system.

 

[VirusType2]

Get the RAM, although I personally feel like 4GB is enough (for nearly any consumer) at this point in time. You are using Windows 64 bit, right?

Windows 7 works the pagefile really well. Even if you have 8 GB, it will save everything open on your desktop to the pagefile when you launch a full screen video game (for example) so that the game has as much RAM as possible.

Not that anyone suggested it, but I'll just say this anyway because it's on my mind: There's no reason to disable the pagefile, with Windows 7, at least. If you don't have a pagefile, then when you have used to much RAM the computer will become unresponsive.