Fastest Write 500 gig SATA II HD's on the market?

[silenkiller]

I'm going to be using a areca ARC-1220 controller. Looking to go with 5 HD's in raid-5. Thinking Seagate Barracuda 7200.12? Looking for the fastest write speed SATA II 500ish gig HD out there right now. Any other opinions? I need to get over 170 mb/s avg. write...

 

[jsc]

Probably the Seagates. The .12's use a single 500 GB platter. I don't think WD is doing that yet.

 

[silenkiller]

Ah. Anyone have any experience with raid 5's and getten those kinds writes?

 

[cjl]

I'd lean towards a 4 disk RAID-10 array instead. That should give you >170MB/s.

 

[MRFS]

Here's the WD 500GB RE3:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=489
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136294&Tpk=N82E16822136294

The smallest WD RE3 with 32MB cache is the 750GB model:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=504
(not available at Newegg any longer)

We have 2 of the latter hosting C: in a RAID 0 on ICH10R,
and we are seeing about 200 MB/second on average in that mode,
measuring "raw reads" on a 50GB C: partition to effect "short strokes".


> I'd lean towards a 4 disk RAID-10 array instead. That should give you >170MB/s.

This one of WD's very best:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=732

(Be aware of the 2TB limitation in XP 32-bit: there are ways
around that limit e.g. variable sector sizing.)


MRFS

 

[silenkiller]

Well, the WD RE4 is most likely the correct type of drive to be using here, but unfortunately for raid 10 i need 4 drives, and that is certainly outside of my budget. So it will either be some of the RE3's or the seagate .12's. I suppose at this point, the seagates are slightly faster, but the WD's are considerably more reliable.

 

[cjl]

Not really. The 7200.12 is a very reliable drive. The .11 was the problem model.

 

[4745454b]

Wait, you can afford 5 drives for RAID5 but you can't afford 4 drives for RAID10? I think I'm missing something. I would say SSDs, but the writes on them aren't that good. Are you sure you need 170MBps writes? (Mb or MB?)