One 1TB WD Caviar Black or Two 150GB WD Velociraptors

[VanillaGuerilla]

I just realized my (2) Velociraptors max speed is 3Gb. I have an ASUS Sabertooth x58 motherboard with (6) SATA 3 connections and (2) Marvell SATA 6 connections. I want to know what is the best possible performance I can get. Should I run the 2 velociraptors on a RAID 0 with SATA 3 or the 1 Caviar black on the SATA 6 connection? I use my PC for gaming and multimedia editing. Here is my components.

Windows 7 X64 Home Premium
i7 950 @ 3.07 GHz
ASUS Sabertooth X58 - motherboard - ATX - LGA1366 Socket
12 GB RAM
GeForce GTX 570

1 TB Caviar Black SATA 6.0 Gb/s 7200 RPM
(2) 150 GB SATA 3.0 Gb/s VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM

I really appreciate your input. Thanks!

 

[rolli59]

Your mechanical HDD drives are not capable of maxing out the SATA 3GB interface so what controllers you use for each does not really matter. I would have the raid array on the SATA 3GB ports and the 1TB on the marvell controller.

 

[VanillaGuerilla]

Your mechanical HDD drives are not capable of maxing out the SATA 3GB interface so what controllers you use for each does not really matter. I would have the raid array on the SATA 3GB ports and the 1TB on the marvell controller.

Thanks! If I am using my pc for gaming and multi media editing, where should I install the OS? Should I even use the velociraptors? Thanks again!

 

[rolli59]

You could use the raptors for the OS and applications which should be faster then the 1TB as storage.

 

[VanillaGuerilla]

You could use the raptors for the OS and applications which should be faster then the 1TB as storage.

I am a complete idiot. I got the numbers confused. The Caviar Black 1TB uses SATA 3 cables with 6.0Gb/s and the (2) Velocirapators use SATA 2 cables with 3.0Gb/s max speed. Does you answer still stay the same? Will the 2 raptors (3GB/s max speed) on RAID 0 array perform faster than the Caviar Black 1TB (6Gb/s max speed)? Sorry for the confusion.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

Rolli59 was correct. Only an SSD can max out the full bandwidth of SATA 3 or SATA 6. No mechanical drives even come close.

To be honest that WD 1TB Black might be faster than those old Raptors. Running them in RAID 0 would make them faster though.

 

[rolli59]

The raptors have average latency of 3ms and the black has 4.2ms, transfer rate is black 126MB/s max http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=100 the raptor 126MB/s (sustained) http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701282.pdf
The latency would make the raptors a little faster regardless off the old interface.

 

[RetiredChief]

for Highest performance: Raid0 the raptors, but do a short stroke, that is create the array using only 1/2 of the disk. Leave the other half alone. and install your OS Plys programs. (added) Best performance is only using 30%, but tat would only be 90 Gigs) End added

This will boost performance over a typical raid0 setup using the entire platter.
Used short stroke on a pare Of WD 640s, cut access time from 12.6 mSec to 9.x (can't remember exact number). Typical raid0 on HDDs ONLY improves Sequencial performance, but short stroke does provide a smal gain to the Random 4 K performance. Down side, lose disk space.

I would recommend moving to an SSD, but that's around $150->$200 and you have the raptors - so no cost. SSDs would blow the raptors doors off.

On sata III (6) HDD on sata 6 interface, only benifit is burst speed, there for a waste of a good sata III port - Except that the Older marvel sata III control is not much good for sata III SSDs anyways, So yes stick your WD 1 TB SATA III drive on the Marvel control (what I did).