Raid 0 or faster hdd

[sap chicken]

Hello,

I’m currently owning a WD Caviar Green boot drive and I am upgrading my desktop. now I think my system will bottleneck on my hard drive because I heard a WD Caviar Green boot drive is to slow, is this true and will I be better of buying another WD Caviar green in raid 0 of just one WD Caviar Black? Or are there faster things in the same price range while still having a nice amount of storing capability?

Thanks from
Carlo Kleijnendorst

 

[ssddx]

the trouble with all the "green" drives on the market is that they run at 5400rpm. this results in sluggish performance.

the other hard drive speeds common in the industry are 7200.12, 10,000, 15,000rpm. with 7200.12 being the most common. the western digital caviar black is a 7200.12.

a good starting place would be to look for graphs showing the read/write performance of both drives (black and green) and to compare them. a direct comparison will tell you what a 1 to 1 swap would act like. multiply the greens number by around 115 to 150% and that will tell you what raid0 would feel like on average.

the only drive out there that will "wow you over" is replacing your boot drive with an ssd. there is a very noticible improvement when doing this. you can get an 80gb for around $160-200 (but havent checked prices recently so they may be off). you can then use your existing drive for "data storage"

in this way you'd have snappy os performance but still have your high data capacity, though the data drive will still be very sluggish.

 

[sap chicken]

Nice and quick replay, thanks for that. So HDD wont improve like 70% in raid? And um do you've got a nice place to get those graphs or is google reliable enough? A ssd sounds nice but I like the convenience of a huge boot drive better I think.

 

[ssddx]

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/raid0-performance.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

keep in mind that performance may be hindered slightly by the raid controller for normal operations such as startup, but for tasks that require alot of disk use you will see the gains. its sort of a tradeoff.

tomshardware main site has some hdd graphs under charts i believe.

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if all you are looking for is snappy OS performance then the first choice would be an SSD and the second would be a 10,000 or 7200.12 drive.

if what you want is faster performance for transferring large files or for multiple read/write operations at once then raid 0 or an SSD would be the best choices.

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it all comes down to what you need your computer for. if you require a vast array of programs to be installed and require alot of space on your boot then an SSD wouldn't be the best option for a small budget. if instead you have alot of data and don't require it to be linked to your boot drive then it works out excellent.

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in your case its sounding like your needs and your budget would be best served by a 7200.12 drive. you would get a moderate increase in performance, maintain capacities and not break your budget at all.

 

[sap chicken]

okee thanks for all the information, I think I'll go for a 7200.12 hdd now and when ssd's around the 120GB get to like 100 euros I can always upgrade again. I think I'll go with a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB for 38 euros. I’m only a bit confused with the caviar black and a sata III connection.

 

[ssddx]

samsung spinpoints seem to be recommended often. almost as much as western digital caviar blacks.

i don't think 7200.12 drives can fully max out sata II let alone benefit from sata III. must be a marketing ploy to raise prices. keep in mind that sata III will revert back to sata II if connected to a sata II port so dont worry about it.