Raptor/RAID question

RAID 0 will help with loading times, but just having the one Raptor should be enough. What do you mostly do with your computer?

mainly play games in the command and conquer family, but i also do the regular office apps and internet, sometimes work on dvd stuff. but agian mainly the games

None of the above. Raptors don't perform any better than a good SATA drive and are 8x more expensive per GB. Get two SATA drives, no RAID, put the OS and apps on one and paging file and data on the other. It's cheap, redundant and fast, giving you simultaneous access to multiple drives. This is much better than RAID0, where two drives simulate all the shortcomings of one.

See Raptors in RAID-0

nhobo, that article is very informative, but is it still reliable considering the data is 4 years old? Don't you think RAID controllers may have improved?

If the tests do stand the test of time I think I would still go with one raptor though just to have a slight edge over other drives (even though I have heard some great things from seagates 7200.11)

(3) One SSD device. Just to be cheeky.

The benefit of the raptor is quicker access times. The read rate is no better than modern high-volume drives. If you put 2 drives in RAID 0, you are increasing the access times (to whichever drive takes longer to get to the right spot on the disk) so you may lose some of the only benefit you get from these drives.

With PC's it's all about balancing the performance return on your money and currently your not going to get your money's worth out of a Raptor. A good 7200RPM drive will be indistiguishable from a Raptor and be quite a bit less expensive. Your best bet would be a 500gb 7200.11 for $110 or as nhobo wrote get a couple.

I second nhobo....Get two good Sata Drives (samsung perhaps) or even 3 and go for RAID 0 with those...

The high RPM of the Raptors just isn't enough to justify the price (for me at least)...you can get the better performance per dollar using simple RAID arrays

XP or Vista? 32 or 64 bits?

nhobo is correct. Having the Paging File on a separate drive could help. Todays HD like Seagate 7200.11 are fast and low priced compare to Raptor.

But my configuration is:

Vista 64 with 4GB
2 Seagate 320GB in RAID-0 (older model 7200.10)
My Paging file is 512MB (yes the old unit! not in GB )

So having the swap file on a different drive or on the same as the OS is irrelevant for me. When I play a game like BF2142 and I quit, I don't have to wait so the OS is reloading stuff from the Paging File, there is none.

If you are rich, you could do a dual RAID-0 (4 raptors) and have the OS and Programs on one, the Paging Files and Data on the second one.   Both world.

If you have only 2GB or less, you should instead upgrade to 4GB (not loose the dual channel), even you have a 32 bits so a little bit more of 3GB will be available. Price is so low and good upgrade.

2 sata drives, no raid, os + apps on 1, paging file and data on the other... where the hell is the redundancy?

Redundancy is only in comparison to RAID0, if one drive goes down you *don't* lose what's on the other.

RAID 0 shows really good improvents in specific benchmarks, and almost no improvement in others. The reason for this is that the faster transfer speeds gained by having a RAID 0 array are limited by the rotational speed of the drive (seek times). Therefore, the benefits of a RAID 0 setup is only really useful when reading and writing loads of SEQUENTIAL data. Sequential read/writes are not done very much in most applications, but a few, such as video editing do this quite a bit. Therefore, the hassle and cost of setting up a RAID 0, as well as the reliaibility lost (2x as likely to lose data from a drive failure), is probably not worth it unless you are using the computer for tasks which you know read and write sequential bits of data often.

Its not true a RAID-0 with 2 drives give you 2 times the chances of a failure. It mean half of people buying a drive get a faulty one? Yes, your chance is a little bit more than having just one. That why there are other RAID safer (1,5,...)

Rule #1: If you care of your data, have a backup procedure.
What kind?
Level 1: Second drive, External drive, DVD.
Level 2: On-Line Backup.
I have both.

That's not what he said. He said that RAID-0 with two drives gives you 2 times the chance of data loss when compared to a single drive, which is a correct statement.

The chance of drive failure doesn't change. It's the fact that when one drive fails, all the data on both drives is lost.

The comparison I like to use is that of a major league baseball player. Let's say he has a .300 batting average. If he gets one plate appearance, what is his chance of getting a hit? Well, that would be 30% (.300).

But if you give him two plate appearances, what is his chance of getting at least one hit between them both? It's (1-(1-0.300)^2) = 0.510 = 51%.

Imagine that the data destruction man gets to swing at your data once a year, and his batting average is 0.050 (5%). If you give him two plate appearances, he has almost double the chance of whacking your data.