RAID 0 - WD VelociRaptors or some other -7200RPM- drive?

Keris · Aug 27, 2013

I finally took the plunge and put a bunch of cash into my rig, and I want to do the HDDs right. At the moment, I am running off of a 4 year old Toshiba 1TB HDD that has waaaaay too many operating hours for me to feel safe with it anymore.

I have a 64gb SSD on order as a boot/OS disk, etc, but I plan on RAID 0 - ing 2 drives to be my 'main' drives -- IE the ones I run my programs/games off of, as well as some storage.
I'm looking to spend ~$200USD for these drives, and my 'best' options look to be:

2x 250GB WD VelociRaptors (~$95usd each) for 500GB total
2x 2 TB WD black/blue or Seagate Barricudas (~$95 each) for 4TB Total

My main question is, Will a modern 10krpm drive like the VelociRaptor provide THAT much of a difference over a modern 7.2krpm drive to justify the price to size difference? When RAIDing them, will the difference even be noticeable beyond a second or two difference?
I mainly use the drives for gaming with occasional video editing.

Second, if I were to get the 7200rpm drives, what drives would you all recommend and why? I'm looking for Sata III 7200rpms in the $80-$100 or less range.

(A larger SSD is out because of the cost/gb. Untill I can get ~500gb for $250ish I'm not going to be using an SSD for anything but booting)

Thanks!

JackNaylorPE · Aug 27, 2013

What special applications are you running that will actually see an observable benefit from RAID ? Those old Raptors will not be able to keep up w/ today's drives.....as for RAID ), here's an old, old THG post ... many links may have expired:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_0#RAID_0

RAID 0 is useful for setups such as large read-only NFS servers where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.

RAID 0 is also used in some gaming systems where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important. However, real-world tests with games have shown that RAID-0 performance gains are minimal, although some desktop applications will benefit.[1][2]

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2101
"We were hoping to see some sort of performance increase in the game loading tests, but the RAID array didn't give us that. While the scores put the RAID-0 array slightly slower than the single drive Raptor II, you should also remember that these scores are timed by hand and thus, we're dealing within normal variations in the "benchmark".

Our Unreal Tournament 2004 test uses the full version of the game and leaves all settings on defaults. After launching the game, we select Instant Action from the menu, choose Assault mode and select the Robot Factory level. The stop watch timer is started right after the Play button is clicked, and stopped when the loading screen disappears. The test is repeated three times with the final score reported being an average of the three. In order to avoid the effects of caching, we reboot between runs. All times are reported in seconds; lower scores, obviously, being better. In Unreal Tournament, we're left with exactly no performance improvement, thanks to RAID-0

If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth."

http://www.techwarelabs.com/articles/hardware/raid-and-gaming/index_6.shtml
".....we did not see an increase in FPS through its use. Load times for levels and games was significantly reduced utilizing the Raid controller and array. As we stated we do not expect that the majority of gamers are willing to purchase greater than 4 drives and a controller for this kind of setup. While onboard Raid is an option available to many users you should be aware that using onboard Raid will mean the consumption of CPU time for this task and thus a reduction in performance that may actually lead to worse FPS. An add-on controller will always be the best option until they integrate discreet Raid controllers with their own memory into consumer level motherboards."

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1001325
"However, many have tried to justify/overlook those shortcomings by simply saying "It's faster." Anyone who does this is wrong, wasting their money, and buying into hype. Nothing more."

http://jeff-sue.suite101.com/how-raid-storage-improves-performance-a101975
"The real-world performance benefits possible in a single-user PC situation is not a given for most people, because the benefits rely on multiple independent, simultaneous requests. One person running most desktop applications may not see a big payback in performance because they are not written to do asynchronous I/O to disks. Understanding this can help avoid disappointment."

http://www.scs-myung.com/v2/index. [...] om_content
"What about performance? This, we suspect, is the primary reason why so many users doggedly pursue the RAID 0 "holy grail." This inevitably leads to dissapointment by those that notice little or no performance gain.....As stated above, first person shooters rarely benefit from RAID 0.__ Frame rates will almost certainly not improve, as they are determined by your video card and processor above all else. In fact, theoretically your FPS frame rate may decrease, since many low-cost RAID controllers (anything made by Highpoint at the tiem of this writing, and most cards from Promise) implement RAID in software, so the process of splitting and combining data across your drives is done by your CPU, which could better be utilized by your game. That said, the CPU overhead of RAID0 is minimal on high-performance processors."

Even the HD manufacturers limit RAID's advantages to very specific applications and non of them involves gaming:

http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/

The video editing will benefit from RAID as the task is write heavy but once done, the need is gone. Today this is done with an SSD and once ya lay the final track to disk, the benefit ceases.

Keris · Aug 28, 2013

Thanks for the reply, Jack.

It was really eye opening. I didn't realize the gains were so negligible/nonexistent with RAID for my intended uses.

Thanks for your help

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RAID 0 - WD VelociRaptors or some other -7200RPM- drive?

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