sata II 7200rpm vs. sata I 10k rpm

[107octane]

I am really looking forward to finally setting up a raid 0. I was browsing newegg and found that there isn't any 10k RPM hdds that are sata II. I use my computer for dvd copying, light gaiming, photoshop, and authoring my own dvds.

1) My question is should I wait for 10k RPM drives with sata II or are the 7200's with sata II faster than the 10k's with sata I?

2) I have a Asus P5WD2 Delux with onboard raid, would it benefit me to keep that or should I find a PCI express card with sata II raid? or regular PCI?

Thanks in advance for any advise!

 

[breakspirit]

SATA II means absolutely nothing. Your hard drives can not transfer anywhere near the speeds of SATA I, much less II.

 

[zenmaster]

I agree, SATA I vs SATA II means nothing.

However, many newer HDD support Perpendicular recording and other technologies to allow for higher data density which means more data can be read/written in a given area. The result is that newer 7200RPM drivers are much faster than older 7200RPM drivers.

Older 10K Drives are still faster, but the difference is much smaller than it used to be. Supposedly there are some newer 10K drives coming soon that will support the higher data density that will allow them to once again pull out further ahead.

It's not likely a dedicated controller will make things that much faster.

Good Luck on your RAID 0, I hope you have lots of backups.

 

[107octane]

Ok thanks for the info. I might wait until the newer faster 10k drives come out. As far as backups go I have plenty of other drives that I don't process data on, just storage.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

New 7200 rpm drives like the Samsung F1 and Seagate 7200.11 kick the pants off the old 10k drives by as much as 36%.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/21/samsung_overtakes_with_a_bang/page9.html

The raptor's reliability is also very poor:

http://www.storagereview.com/WD1500ADFD.sr?page=0%2C9
"According to filtered and analyzed data collected from participating StorageReview.com readers, the Western Digital Raptor WD1500 is more reliable than 12% of the other drives in the survey that meet a certain minimum floor of participation"

RAID 0 Raptors will boot you faster and still have an advantage when accessing large amounts of very small files (tho this is much reduced with 32 MB caches on the new 7200 rpm drives), but for games, you can expect a performance increase of less than 2 %

http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=SingleDriveVsRaid0

"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, "

"Bear in mind however, that data striped across multiple drives is much more vulnerable to loss as a physical failure of even one drive results in the loss of all data on the entire array. If capacity is the goal, it is almost always better to run the two drives as separate units. "

 

[107octane]

Is there going to be any difference in raid speeds with onboard vs. pci express sata raid cards vs. pci sata raid cards?

 

[JackNaylorPE]

That's gonna depend on the actual cards used but TH did do a RAID article recently....have you checked the storage section ?