Gamers are always looking for ways to improve their gaming performance and experience. One question that often comes up is whether using a RAID setup for your game storage can help. RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) allows you to link two or more drives together to get increased storage, speed, or redundancy. But does using RAID really help with gaming? Here’s a quick look at the pros and cons.
Quick Answer
For most gamers, RAID is generally not necessary for gaming alone. The increased speed and redundancy benefits of RAID come more into play for intensive professional workloads. For pure gaming usage, a single fast SSD is usually sufficient and the easiest solution.
What is RAID?
RAID is a technology that allows you to use multiple physical disks (hard drives or SSDs) in concert to act as a single logical drive. The main RAID levels and their benefits are:
- RAID 0 – Stripes data across disks for increased performance. But has no redundancy.
- RAID 1 – Mirrored disks for 100% redundancy. But no capacity or performance gain.
- RAID 5 – Stripes data and adds parity for redundancy with minimal capacity loss.
- RAID 10 – Mirrored stripes for both performance and redundancy.
By combining multiple physical disks, RAID aims to improve capacity, speed, or reliability versus a single disk.
Does RAID improve gaming performance?
For gaming workloads in particular, increased storage speed is the main potential advantage of RAID. Certain RAID levels can improve speed by “striping” data across multiple disks or using parallelization.
RAID 0 stripes data across all disks with no parity, allowing close to cumulative performance. But it has no redundancy making it riskier. RAID 10 mirrors stripes to get speed along with redundancy.
In certain cases, these RAID configurations can provide a performance boost for gaming. But there are tradeoffs to consider:
- Expense – RAID requires buying multiple disks which raises costs.
- Complexity – RAID is more complex to setup and manage versus a single disk.
- Diminishing returns – A single modern SSD may already provide enough speed for most games.
When can RAID improve game loading?
Game load times depend heavily on storage speed and bandwidth. RAID can improve loading by spreading data across multiple disks that can be accessed in parallel.
RAID 0 in particular can boost bandwidth for sequential loads. Benchmarks show it can provide up to double the read speed of a single disk depending on the configuration.
For open-world games with large continuous environments, RAID 0 can help reduce pop-in and texture thrashing by improving streaming bandwidth. Shooters or racing games with large maps may also benefit.
However, for games with smaller discrete levels or maps, a single fast SSD is usually sufficient and RAID provides diminishing improvements.
Example game load time improvements
| Game | Single SSD | 2 Disk RAID 0 |
|---|---|---|
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | 59 seconds | 33 seconds |
| Final Fantasy 15 | 51 seconds | 29 seconds |
Does RAID improve gaming frame rates?
For frame rate performance during gameplay, RAID provides little to no benefit for most games. In-game frame rates are limited by GPU power and game engine performance, not storage speed.
Once game assets are loaded, storage is only accessed intermittently for streaming new content. This has minimal impact on frame rates.
Video editing and other production workloads that constantly read/write large files can benefit from RAID. But for gaming, the storage system has little impact on FPS after loading.
How can RAID improve reliability for game storage?
While RAID has minimal impact on gaming performance, some RAID levels can improve the reliability and fault tolerance of game storage.
RAID 1 and RAID 10 use disk mirroring to provide 100% redundancy. If a single disk fails, your data and games remain accessible from the other disk(s).
RAID 5 stripes data with distributed parity, allowing single disk failures while only losing 1 disk’s worth of capacity. A good balance of redundancy and storage.
This redundancy can provide valuable protection against game data loss or downtime. Drive failures can always happen unexpectedly.
Is RAID worth it for gaming?
For most gamers, the downsides generally outweigh the minor benefits of using RAID:
- No significant frame rate improvements
- Loading only improved in certain games
- Added expense and complexity
- Potential performance bottlenecks from RAID overhead
A single fast SSD provides plenty of speed for most games while being simple and cost effective. NVMe SSDs can provide up to 3500MB/s — likely more than enough for gaming.
Better alternatives to RAID for gaming
Rather than RAID, gamers should focus their budgets on other system components for the best performance:
- GPU – The graphics card is by far the biggest determinant of gaming performance and FPS. An upgraded GPU brings much more benefit.
- CPU – A fast multi-core CPU prevents bottlenecks and is important for high FPS.
- RAM – Having sufficient RAM capacity and speed ensures game assets can be quickly accessed.
- Cooling – Better cooling allows CPU/GPU to sustain higher performance and FPS.
For storage, a single high capacity NVMe SSD provides an excellent combination of speed, capacity, and value without the headaches of RAID.
When does RAID make sense for gaming?
There are a few specific cases where RAID can be beneficial for gaming:
- Storage drive failure protection – RAID 1/10 add valuable redundancy against drive failure and downtime.
- Maximizing loading speeds – RAID 0 can help in open world games with long loading times.
- Professional gaming/streaming – The redundancy and extra bandwidth can help minimize downtime.
For most typical gaming uses, a single SSD is best. But RAID can be justified for specific gaming workloads that need maximum performance or reliability.
RAID vs SSD: Which is faster for gaming?
SSDs are far faster than traditional hard drives for gaming, with their only downside being higher cost per gigabyte. The interfaces and types of SSD include:
- SATA SSD – up to 550MB/s speeds
- NVMe SSD – up to 3500MB/s
- PCIe 4.0 SSDs – up to 5000MB/s
High-end NVMe SSDs can surpass the speeds of some RAID setups. And without the complexity and cost overhead of managing a RAID array.
For purely gaming, an NVMe SSD provides a better speed upgrade path than RAID. Multiple NVMe SSDs in RAID 0 can combine the performance benefits of both technologies.
Conclusion
While RAID can help with things like redundancy and maximum loading speeds, it is generally not necessary for the average gamer. Today’s high-speed NVMe SSDs provide more than enough performance for most games.
Upgrading the GPU, CPU, RAM, and cooling will make a much more noticeable impact on gaming. RAID is best left for mission-critical production use cases where maximum throughput and redundancy are required.
For game storage, a high capacity SATA or NVMe SSD offers the best combination of speed, value and simplicity for most gaming PCs and setups.
So in summary: use RAID if you specifically need the redundancy or have heavy loading demands. Otherwise, a single fast SSD is likely the smarter choice.