Raptor vs Caviar Black

[htoonthura]

Hello,

I need 2 hds to set up raid0. I see 74 gb 10,000 rpm rapor drive for 60$. Should i get 2 of them or get 2 caviar black edition to raid them. Price per storage is noticeable between them. Can i get noticeable performance gain raptor over caviar black. Please let me know.

The rest of my sys specs are as follows:

core i7 920 @ 3.8
Gigabytes E 58 ud4p
6 gb of ddr3
ATI 4870 1 GB
seagate 1.5 tb
CORSAIR CMPSU-550VX 550W ATX12V V2.2 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready

Another quick though,

Can my psu handle additional 2 drives with the above set up. Your help is appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[sub mesa]

You don't tell anything what you will be using it for, for desktops a velociraptor is faster than 7200rpm disks, due to their lower latency. If its worth the price, that's for you to judge.

 

[RetiredChief]

I'would probably go with the WD back, or Seagate -12 because of the per Mbyte cost and the fact that in everyday performace you would not see a big diff.
Read this topic:
www.tomshardware.com/forum/249993-32-seagate-7200-st3500418as-raid0-tune

Although it deals primarily with the Seagate -12 drive the WD Balck is very simular in performace.

With the larger HDD you can use "short stroking" which will cut your access time down to 8.5 -> 9.5 mSec. A 200 Gig Short stroke will limit your operating system to the outer 15 -> 20 % of the platters. The higher density (on the -12 500 Gigs per platter) will offset some off the diff in RPMs

Some other factors that will effect performance;
For operating system/programs - The normal default of 128K strip is too large.
last nigth Curiosity got the better of my, so I analyzed my HD. With a 128K stripe approx 70 % of my files would have no benifit as they would be on only one of the drives.. With a 64K strip that goes to 35%. ON my system a 16 or 32K stripe would be a good ompromise which would make approx 50% of my system/program files that would be spread out obetween both drives. NOTE a good 45% of my files are less than 8 K, infact 35% are 4 K or less. and do not benifit from striping, other than the faster access time from short stroking.

Another factor to consider is Cluster size when formating. Larger cluster size improves performace, BUT also increase "Waste". With small hard drive the larger cluster size this equates to a larger % of the hard drive that will be lost.

Based on old rule of thumb, With 100K files and a 4K (default) cluster the waste is approx 2k times 100K or 200 Mbytes. Increasing cluster size to 8K would increase wasted HDD size to approx. 400 MBytes. On the HDD that is dedicated mostly to video filles (Many arround 1G) I upped my cluster size to 16K.
Note: A 40 Bytes file will require 4 Kbytes, or 8 Kbytes for a 8K cluster.

Added: Do a google on Stripe size vs peformance and on short stroking.