3x Spinpoint F3 to 1x Caviar Green - performance hit (Media)

Volemic

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Nov 2, 2012
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Hey guys - I was hoping someone can clear this up for me!

I currently have 2x Samsung 830 SSDs in raid0 for OS and 4x 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint F3s in raid0 for media/games.

The following reasons are making me consider a change:

(1) I want to consolidate space - Raid0 paranoia, heat, space (my twelve hundred gamer case drives are full!)
(2) one of my intel sata ports is failing on my Ga-X58A-UD5 which is throwing errors at my Raid array.

I'm thinking of selling 3 of the spinpoints and buying one caviar green 3TB drive to over come the above problems. This means I'll have my OS on 2x Samsung 830 in raid0, 1x Samsung spinpoint f3 for games and the caviar green 3TB drive purely for media/documents.

The question arising from this exercise is - Will I notice a massive hit in the way of writing/reading media files to the drive with the swap over to the caviar green?? Note: Just media, not games/OS. But lots and lots of media!

Thanks for all help :)
 

tomatthe

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If you are just playing movies or videos from the drive it will still be more then fast enough to do that without issue. If you are moving files to/from the drive very frequently it will be slower then the original setup. I assume you've got some backup of everything, or just don't care about any of the data on either of those raid 0 sets.
 

Volemic

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Nov 2, 2012
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I've got the important stuff backed up. and I don't really care about my Raid0 for the OS tbh, if anything happens, I can easily reinstall apps/OS. If I was to look at other options for a 3TB HDD, preferably not over-the-top expensive, what are my options? I initially considered the Hitatchi Deskstar 7k3000 but I saw some users making comments on noise/vibration issues.
 

Slothy

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Dec 3, 2010
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You can't hope to move from a four disk RAID-0 setup to a single drive and keep comparable performance. Even if it has 3/4 the capacity of the old setup, you're dropping the spindle count from 4 to 1, and that's the more important factor. Additionally, you're moving from a 7200 RPM drive to a 5x00 (variable, if I remember) RPM drive meaning seek and read times will be higher (slower). These green drives have also been said to wear out substantially faster as well, due to the frequent head parking that occurs. I seem to recall that they have been discontinued as they offer negligible savings on energy costs per year.

If you had a lot of headroom in your setup's perfromce before, you should be fine. But if were coming even close to taxing your old setup, I would expect it to be night and day.
 

Volemic

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Nov 2, 2012
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Yes I understand that, that's why I put them in RAID0 in the first place, however, I'm thinking that I'm not fully taxing the setup, and maybe there's really no point in running 3x drives anyway.

My question regarding the performance hit relates to media. My 3x Spinpoints will house media files only. Granted I will be copying some files back and forth, i.e. backing up music from a CD to a drive, or transferring files from one drive to the other, but that would be it.