Raid or 150GB raptor?

[mooney101]

What would be faster a ONE Western Digital 150GB raptor or two Serial ATA II 16 buffer 7200rpm drives in a raid sit up.

One advantage to the raptor is its ONE DRIVE (no raid to worry about), and also i would have the option of adding a second one later for raid

 

[RyanMicah]

Which is "faster" is really about a tie. It depends on what you do with it. Some tests will tell you that a single speedy drive is faster, others will say raid is faster. Some of it depends on your raid controller and drivers too. For the cost, two 7200rpm 16mb drives in raid are better. I have two 8mb 7200rpm drives set up in one of my systems, and two 150 raptors in another. Raptors put out a lot of heat too. Reasonably, there's no reason a couple of Caviars won't do great.

This article may help you as well.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/06/wd1500ad_raptor_xtends_performance_lead/

As far as the Raptor X goes...the clear cover is neat, then you forget it's there and are more annoyed with the mATX system on your desk because of all the noise the raptor makes. It's a cool idea but only for super rich enthusiasts who build computers just to show off their hardware. The raptor itself is a great drive, but for the noise, heat, cost and storage capacity I'd recommend a raid-0 setup. For $100 or so you can get a lot of fast storage. Raid drivers can be tricky though, and you'll probably need a floppy drive handy if you go raid. Although you won't necessarily have to put it in your finished computer. Do yourself a favor and get a couple of good business class drives with 16mb cache if you can afford them.

 

[choirbass]

simply, if youre NOT going with a server type usage, or dealing with movie or audio editing, production and what not... raid 0 will offer very little benefit, in the order of 0%-2% on average for typical desktop applications, and improvement of game load times (windows boot times being the primary exception to that)

if you are looking for redundancy however raid 1 is more practical

for desktop usage, get the raptor 150... dont bother with raid 0

for server usage, having at least raid 5 is a good idea then anyhow


heres a review from anandtech on practical benefits of raid 0:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=1

 

[RyanMicah]

I completely disagree. The price for one 150 gig raptor is more than price of two 160gig caviars. EVERYONE is raiding now, not just businesses. LOL You will notice raid in game load time. Games are getting larger and DVD drives aren't getting faster. That means that in the near future we'll still be installing the DVD games to the hard drive. Raid is worth the bit of trouble, and it costs less. This guy sounds like he works for Western Digital, he's not making much sense. Two 7200rpm drives will provide you with similar speed, more storage and cost less. Raptors are very fast but just not necessary. Why do you think WD is the only one making 10000rpm sata drives? Redundancy is for SERVERS. He's ass-backwards. You don't need redundancy for a home gaming system. You can always reinstall an OS games and back up saves on a third drive. You won't notice much increase in windows boot up if any with raid, he's right on that. Your raid controller has to initialize and that takes a second at POST. Big programs and games will load faster with raid than a single drive, unless you use a raptor drive. But the raptor is pretty much a tie. Ask anyone else who actually uses raid 0. Raid-1 is good, but not really that necessary. If you want redundancy just do it manually with one extra drive and keep your installation CD's around. In fact, make a disc of all the up to date drivers that you download from manufacturer websites so that when you reinstall windows you have all your drivers and downloading programs easily and quickly accessible. Reinstalling windows from time to time is a good idea from time to time anyway, I myself don't use anti-virus and adware programs because they slow my comp.

 

[RyanMicah]

simply, if youre NOT going with a server type usage, or dealing with movie or audio editing, production and what not... raid 0 will offer very little benefit, in the order of 0%-2% on average for typical desktop applications, and improvement of game load times (windows boot times being the primary exception to that)

if you are looking for redundancy however raid 1 is more practical

for desktop usage, get the raptor 150... dont bother with raid 0

for server usage, having at least raid 5 is a good idea then anyhow


heres a review from anandtech on practical benefits of raid 0:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=1

From your review...

Here, you can see that the write performance of RAID-0 can be almost double that of a single drive, since twice as much data gets written at the same time. The higher write performance is obtained at the expense of some controller overhead, since the RAID controller has to handle splitting up data into stripes before sending it to the drives themselves - but with modern day microprocessors being as fast as they are, the overhead is usually thought of as negligible.

The reason their "real world" tests are only 2.6% faster is because they are little files. By the time the hard drives figures out where to start reading or writing most of the count time has passed. Things like encoding can be hardware limited and your hard drive isn't necessarily the bottleneck then. The speed he's looking for from either a 10,000 rpm drive or two 7200rpm drives will be noticeable when he loads games and when he opens large files or programs. For the cost, 7200rpm drives are certainly the way to go. Those benchmarks are pretty stupid, the article is kind of lame. They measure things like 3D image creation...which would be stored in RAM in a benchmark, not your hard drive anyway. Bogus!

You just offered up an article that pretty much clarified everything I was saying. The raid drive is ever so slightly faster but way less cost effective.

 

[choirbass]

yes, i did have 4 raptors in raid 0... yes, certain 'situations' do benefit from raid 0... no, none of them failed...

if you dont remember from before... i heavily advocated using raid 0, in fact, im using raid 0 right now, but with only 2 raptors now due to how much heat was being generated, and how much cooling was needed, made a lot of noise also (only keeping raid though for benefitting windows boot times mind you, because i do tend to restart a lot)

with 4 raptors, yes, windows did install faster... yes, windows did boot up faster... yes, applications do install faster...

with 4 raptors, no, games did not load faster... no, applications did not start up faster... and yes, there was a ton of heat generated also...

yes... people do use raid, the option is there to do so... it does NOT mean you will benefit a great deal in every situation... quite the contrary.

 

[RyanMicah]

I never said he'd benefit in every situation...in fact I clearly outlined where he would see a benefit...are you agreeing with my posts?

 

[choirbass]

no, im stating a fact, thats all... but, i suppose in that respect were not really disagreeing at all then either

 

[RyanMicah]

Heh, ok then choirboy...err, choirbass.

 

[choirbass]

lol, okay

 

[RyanMicah]

If I could go back and do things over the only change I'd make is getting more ram instead of getting these silly loud hot raptors. I'd get another set of 7200rpm drives instead and another 2gigs of 3500LL Pro.

 

[choirbass]

yeah, i cant say much for the raptors themselves being slow... but cost/performance ratio is pretty off, lol... yeah, more memorys always a good thing to have

 

[mooney101]

WOW hot topic. Thanks guys. So anyone else?

 

[rwaritsdario]

Only in burst speeds (startup) and <300MB files can a RAID 0 config match (but not outperform) a single Raptor. The Raptor beats in everything else.

PS. I believe we have a Hard Disks section...