HD Selection?

[ripken204]

i wasnt talking about the price, i was talking about performance.

and newegg must have gotten rid of that discount, for a while i think the 74gb raptor was around 130$ which i know is still crazy.. but now its only 15$ more for the 150gb versions, lol. i just want to try out a raptor some time and see how they really are, i just cant force myself to pay that much for it.

[Zxian]

Well - performance is more or less the same. I doubt that you'd really notice a difference. In terms of what's the best value, 2xWD3200AAKS is far better than a single Raptor.

[vegettoxp]

A lot of useful information to read and help me make my final decision. Just to give you guys a heads up, I don't plan to do RAID. I have never setup RAID, ever. So I don't plan to do it now. Regarding the Raptor Subject, the reason I want the Raptor is because of it 10,000 RPM and the Seek time. Having the Raptor as the Main HD for the system will help in overall Performance, In my opinion. If I am wrong, please let me know. The other drives I plan to put in will just be Storage HD's. Either 2TB or 4TB. I haven't decided on how may TB's I need as of storage.

Also if you guys don't mind telling me what are the Pros and Cons of RAID. To tell you guys the truth, the reason I have never setup RAID is because I never needed too. The system I am running right now has 300GB Maxtor and a another 250GB Maxtor and I have never had any problems as of lost data so far. Hopefully it will say that way. I know you need two of the same HD's in order to do RAID.

Also about spending money on the Raptor, I know I can get 2 WD 500GB HD's for that same price, but like ripken204 said, I wanna see the Raptor Performance in my new system running Vista!

THX for all the input!

[Zxian]

@Vegetto - RAID0 isn't true RAID. It's striping the data on the disks for purely performance reasons.

You said that you wanted the Raptor for the performance boost. Setting up two drives in RAID0 will give you better overall system performance than a single raptor. You'll get a little hit with seek times, but usually that makes up for itself with the higher transfer speeds. You wanted to know the pros and cons of RAID. See this page. It gives you pretty much all the basic information about RAID that you need for now.

Did you see the graph I showed you? That's' two 320GB drives vs two raptors. A single raptor will give you worse performance than that - plain and simple. Long story short - RAID0 gives a noticeable performance gain over a single drive. Yes, you lose the data on both drives if one dies, but you shouldn't store vital data on the RAID0 array. That's why you would use a RAID1 or higher arrangement for your 500GB storage drives.

If you want to see a case example of someone who's setup massive storage and performance in the past few months, look no further. The two key points - 1.5TB of redundant storage in on a 3ware controller, and a quad-core system that takes about 20 seconds to boot up. The former wouldn't be possible without RAID5, and the latter wouldn't be possible without RAID0. Once you go RAID, you never go back.

[nmX.Memnoch]

A lot of useful information to read and help me make my final decision. Just to give you guys a heads up, I don't plan to do RAID. I have never setup RAID, ever. So I don't plan to do it now. Regarding the Raptor Subject, the reason I want the Raptor is because of it 10,000 RPM and the Seek time. Having the Raptor as the Main HD for the system will help in overall Performance, In my opinion. If I am wrong, please let me know.

Two cheaper drives in RAID0 will give you much better performance. The Raptors haven't really been updated in a while other than to come out with the new 150GB capacity...but that's about the only change to them. Where the Raptors really shine is when you have them configured in a file server on a really good RAID controller, and with multiple users accessing them at the same time. For a single user setup (a desktop) there's not that much of a performance improvement to justify the cost.

A pair of (much) cheaper current technology drives configured in RAID0 will give you much better performance on a single user setup. Sure, if one drive fails you lose everything...but what makes it so different from running a single drive? With a single drive, if that drive fails you lose everything anyway...so take the chance and increase your performance with RAID0.

The other drives I plan to put in will just be Storage HD's. Either 2TB or 4TB. I haven't decided on how may TB's I need as of storage.

You need to research this. First, if you plan on going greater than 1TB for a single volume, you will be setting up RAID. There's no way around it because there is no single drive that's larger than 1TB right now. Second, there are issues that need to be dealt with when going above 2TB. Most RAID controllers won't allow you to configure an array larger than 2TB anyway.

Also if you guys don't mind telling me what are the Pros and Cons of RAID. To tell you guys the truth, the reason I have never setup RAID is because I never needed too. The system I am running right now has 300GB Maxtor and a another 250GB Maxtor and I have never had any problems as of lost data so far. Hopefully it will say that way. I know you need two of the same HD's in order to do RAID.

You can find plenty of information on Google by searching for the term 'RAID'. Some of the information is good, some of it is bad, and some of it is downright wrong. To put it plainly, the most commonly used RAID levels are 0 (striping), 1 (mirroring), and 5 (striping with parity). RAID10 (striping with mirroring) is starting to become more of a player now as well since drive sizes have gotten larger and prices have gone down.

One word of warning: You do not want to run RAID5 on an integrated or low-end RAID controller. It'll use the CPU to calculate the parity information and hurt performance of the system in every way imagineable.

Also about spending money on the Raptor, I know I can get 2 WD 500GB HD's for that same price, but like ripken204 said, I wanna see the Raptor Performance in my new system running Vista!

See above. Two (good) drives in RAID0 will blow a single Raptor out of the water. Edited August 29, 2007 by nmX.Memnoch

[m16si]

Hello i need some help !

I've downloaded HD Tach and ran it!

I have a SeaGate 250GB Barracuda ATA 7200RPM HD.

And speed that my HD reaches in HD Tach is only in Burst speed 87,6 MB/s What is wrong ?

And Average Read: 58.8 mb/s

Why such a bad result ? sad.gif

How can i get ULTRA DMA 6 ? I currently have UDMA 5

Thnx

Edited August 29, 2007 by m16si

[ripken204]

if that's your max speed then that's pretty good.

[Zxian]

In order to get UDMA6, both your IDE controller and hard drive need to support it. For being a UDMA5 drive, those results are pretty good.

[nmX.Memnoch]

UDMA5 was the highest official PATA speed anyway. UDMA6 is 133MB/s and was something that Maxtor did on their own. Few controllers (and drives for that matter) ever added support for it.

[puntoMX]

... Few controllers (and drives for that matter) ever added support for it...

I have to correct you on that, most of the controllers support it, but brands like WD and Seagate didn’t, but Hitachi for example did .

[nmX.Memnoch]

Thinking about it...you're right. NVIDIA has it in their southbridge controllers. Highpoint has it on their controllers*. And a few other addin card makers had it. Even 3ware added support to their PATA RAID controllers. Intel and Promise never added support to any of their products mainly because Maxtor was the only drive maker** who was supporting it in their drives...plus we all know how Intel is about supporting non-official "standards".

* If I'm not mistaken, it was Highpoint controllers that Maxtor was including with their drives when they were trying to push the standard.

** I don't recall Hitachi ever having UDMA6 support, but I may be wrong on that as well.

[puntoMX]

http://www.promise.com/support/download/do...s=100&go=GO

http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/m...5c1a70eac4f0a0/

To keep you from having doubts .

[nmX.Memnoch]

Gah...I forgot about the Ultra133 line.

[vegettoxp]

Hey Guys, I was just wondering, do I really need to do RAID for my storage drives. I haven't don't it in the past and I have read on Post#50 that more the 2TB is not supported, so I was thinks why bother with RAID at all. You guys tell me if I should do it or not.

Also I want to say thank you for the info on Raptor vs 2 WD HD. I will look into that steup. Heck if I get what I want with the 2 HD RAID Setup verus the Raptor, I will go the cheaper way.

THX!

P.S. Fusion

[radix]

I have a Seagate 320gb 16mb sata2 which install Windows XP with 3,5 min faster than Maxtor 200gb 8mb sata2.

So I recomend Seagate instead Maxtor but you can take a look here: http://www.anandtech.com/ in section storage at the tests.