Get a performance 1tb hdd or Get a 2nd identical HDD to RAID

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lreyes66

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Dec 11, 2007
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Ok i currently have a samsung 840 128 ssd, seagate 500gb 7200rpm 6gb/s, and a seagate 250gb im recycling from my old pc.


I was wondering if a "performance" 1TB HDD like a WD Cavier black or HDD similar was worth it? (games, school work, etc)

or is it better if i buy another Seagate 500gb to set up a RAID config.


I dont know too much about RAID but i hard it would be faster then a single HDD. That true?
 
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GunnTech

GunnTech

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Mar 26, 2013
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Hello,
the answer is yes and no. Yes it is true that you can get more performance in a RAID over a single drive of the same type. but keep in mind that in RAID the equivalent portion of data is distributed between all of the discs and as such you will see better performance.
That being said if one drive dies the non of your data that is not backed up on an independent HDD will be lost sans a boat load of work and money to get that drive repaired and recovered. but to make a long story short if the "Performance" drive you are looking at is faster than both of your raid drives than it might be worth the money and time but if you not that the performance of a raid is faster(witch is usually the case) and you have a drive to back up all of the important school data, a RAID would be preferable.
 
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firo40

firo40

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You would get better preformance in a Raid configuration but a higher failure rate. The preformance of 1tb 64mb cache 7200 rpm hdd is great. You have an SSD for preformance anyways which 2 500gb hdds would never compete with in a raid config
 
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geofelt

geofelt

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Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.
You might gain some benefit with a single app running. But with some multitasking going on, there will be little benefit.

If you need added capacity, by all means, buy a modern 1tb drive. If you are looking for a noticeable improvement in performance, I think you will be disappointed.
 
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geofelt

geofelt

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At one time, I had a Intel 80gb X25-M SSD. It worked well, but I needed more space, so I bought a second.
I really wanted a 160gb single image for the "C" drive, so I combined the two in raid-0.
It worked well, but I could not detect any improvement in my user experience.
Later, I used the 80gb drives in other PC's and replaced them with a single X25-M 160gb drive, and performance was equal, if not better.
 
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lreyes66

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oh ok. I was either gonna buy a seperate 256 SSD or another 120 SSD. Id rather have 1 SSD parition to worry about and have the HDD as separate drives. So i guess i might be learning more towards the 120.
 
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