Raid controller for better performance SCSI or SATA.

canonian

October 16, 2008 9:40:37 PM

Currently I am running a System with several pysical drives, bear with me here but you need to understand what I have done and where I would like to go.

I am running an Abit MB IP35-Pro I tested the on-board raid controller, the performance results could not beat a Single Raptor drive, I tried raid 1,5 and 10, zero did boost performance but I do not want to risk my data on raid zero.

I do a lot of Photoshop work, and use other disk instense editing applications that rail the hard drives. Currently I have a 150gig raptor as my boot and program drive OS swap is there as well, a 74gig raptor as my Photoshop scratch drive and bridge thumbnail cache, and (3) 750gig 7200 rpm SATA drives for photo storage. I have played with moving swap files around etc and the above does the best thus far.

Going forward I would like to do a RAID 10 setup to hold my photos and obtain better disk throughput. When I run Adobe Bridge and it generates thumbnails it kills the drive. If I go SATA I need a 4 port card that uses PCI Express not PCI-X. My other option is using (8) 36gig 10,000 rpm SCSI SCA2 drives I have sitting here housed in an external case with a SCSI raid controller.

Either way can someone suggest a good performing SATA 4 port card (all drives internal to my case) or a SCSI external case and SCSI Raid card (PCI or PCI-E) that has an external port to plug into the external case. Although with SCSI in a raid 10 144gigs is not enough to hold all my photos but is plenty of space to house the photos I need to work on currently, then I can move them off to the SATAs at somepoint. Raid card must function with Vista 64bit.

Thanks if you need more info just ask.

More about : raid controller performance scsi sata

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roadrunner197069

October 16, 2008 10:07:40 PM

It really depends on the transfer rate your drives can handle. I just went from a single 500G HDD with 53 mb/s transfer speed to 2 640s in raid 0 and now i get 181 mb/s average. The difference is night and day.

Just because you have 10000 RPM drives it dont mean the transfer rate is great.

You probably better off Raid 0 ing your OS and apps and use a single big drive for storage/backup.

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darkguset

October 16, 2008 10:37:21 PM

RocketRaid 3320: 8 ports - 8x PCIe (expensive) - http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rr3320.htm
RocketRaid 3120 or 3120LF: 4 ports - 1x PCIe (much less expensive) - http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/rr3120.htm

They are both hardware RAIDs and both pretty fast. If you need 4 ports it might be worth getting 2x 3120 instead of 1x 3320 (better for your pocket).

On the other hand if you do not have 2x PCIe free, you will have to go for the 3320 with the 8 ports.

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canonian

October 17, 2008 12:00:29 AM

roadrunner197069 said:

It really depends on the transfer rate your drives can handle. I just went from a single 500G HDD with 53 mb/s transfer speed to 2 640s in raid 0 and now i get 181 mb/s average. The difference is night and day.

Just because you have 10000 RPM drives it dont mean the transfer rate is great.

You probably better off Raid 0 ing your OS and apps and use a single big drive for storage/backup.

I agree on the 10k rpm versus transfer speed. My OS and Apps drive is not getting hit hard, its the drive the photos are on. My current 10k drives SATA in the system ard WD Raptors..

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