2 x WD Caviar Blue RAID 0 vs. Single WD Caviar Black

Forum Storage : Hard Drives 2 x WD Caviar Blue RAID 0 vs. Single WD Caviar Black

im building up my new computer with sandy bridge and that kind of stuff but im not sure what to choose for storage, i cant do international shippment so in my country the best options i have are these 2:

2x WD Caviar Blue 500gb 16mb Cache on RAID 0

or

1x WD Caviar Black 1000gb 64mb Cache

both sata 3 6gb/s 7200rpm
the uses for these hard drives would be like 60% gaming, 20% recording with fraps and 20% encoding videos

what is the best option? can the 2 blue hdd beat a single black hdd with more cache on these programs?

Message edited by sekiho on 04-07-2011 at 09:19:45 AM

Reply to sekiho

I'd go with the black. Will consume less power, less chance of loosing your data with a HDD crash, maybe less heat in your case, and more space for your data.

Reply to cletus_slackjawd

Are you nuts?

It beats it no PROBLEM. More risk with Raid 0 but just back it up son.

Less heat, more space, less power, less chance of losing data? All those are avoidable and negligible or easily avoided unless you live in the rain forest.

------------------------------ Fractal R3, 955/Hyper 212+, StealthxStream II 600w, HIS 5850, G.Skill 4gb, Vertex 30gb
Reply to flashfir

Or you could go for 3 x Caviar Blue in RAID 5. Provides redundancy as well, as well as benefits of RAID 0. Failure rate in RAID 0 is almost 10%, assuming failure rate of 5% for each drive.

Software backup will always be a hassle.

EDIT : RAID 5 performance benefits are not as good as RAID 0, as I just found out. Read speed is as good, but random write speed is very slow for small amounts of data. Other people more experienced may be able to provide more details.

Message edited by kkiddu on 04-07-2011 at 08:58:47 PM

------------------------------ AMD Athlon 2400+, 1GB + 128MB DDR-1, Onboard graphics, pixel shader not available, vertex shader not available. Go laugh.
Reply to kkiddu

Wow, looks like you have lots of conflicting opinions to sort through...

The fact is while RAID can increase transfer rates, no RAID organization can reduce access times. So the answer you're looking for depends on whether you're hoping to speed up things that depend on access times (in which case no, RAID won't help) or transfer rates (in which case it can help in certain cases).

Access times are most important when the machine has to read lots of smallish files, such as when it boots or launches programs. RAID won't do much to improve that kind of activity.

Transfer rates are most important when you're copying large files or using a program like a video editor which has to read and write large files very quickly. RAID will help those kinds of programs.

RAID can complicate your life, so my advice is to choose it only if you really need it.

Reply to sminlal

I just bought a single Corsair 60gb SSD with the sandforce controller on it and it really makes a difference. I don't know about reliablity yet but as for speed and price, highly recommended.
If you still are interested in the WD Blue RAID-0 vs single black, search google for actual benchmarks rather than opinions here. RAID-0 for me is like SLI in video cards, it's technologically cool but has it has it's draw backs. Like sais above, the simpler you can keep it, the less hassle in the long run, unless you just like to mess around and see what can me done. I do have a RAID-5 array that I'm pretty happy with, it takes 4 Drives, and you lose about 15% of total space. I took the time to read the comment by SMINLAL and he has the most thoughtful answer so far. Good comments by everyone, but I do disagree that you are going to see much or any perceivable speed increase with RAID-0 on the Blues vs Black.

Edit: Found this article that does benchmarks on what we are talking about, read all the way through, some small surprises.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forum [...] p?t=248560

Message edited by cletus_slackjawd on 04-12-2011 at 03:09:21 AM

Reply to cletus_slackjawd

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