Fastest: 4xSATAII 80GB 8MB vs. 2xSATAII 320GB 16MB, all in RAID 0

B

bluesting

Active Member
Joined
Mar 17, 2006
Messages
75
Reaction score
0
Location
Midrand
Hi guys,

I'm gonna buy a new soon, was wondering what your thoughts on these 2 configurations would be.

4xSATAII 80GB 8MB
Pros: 4xSATA 3gb/s configuration, cheaper by $25
Cons: lower total capacity, 8MB cache, possible higher rate of failure

2xSATAII 320GB 16MB
Pros: Higher total capacity, 16MB cache
Cons: 2xSATA only, slightly more expensive


My Use: Games 50%, Applications 50%
All drives are new Seagate SATA NCQ 3gb/s drives
Or do I double the cost and get another 2 16MB drives?

What do you guys think? Which is faster? 4x8MB cache drives or 2x16MB cache drives?
 
The 2x320GB drives with 16MB cache will be faster if configured in a RAID0 stripe set.

And you will have less chance for a failure, like you said yourself.

The Seagate 320GB SATA2 16MB HD is currently the best value for money IMO, with a nice 5 year guarantee.
 
And its only 25$ cheaper, but half the space? Its not much of a question if you ask me... Hard drive performance is also a bit overrated, at the speed of the two 320GB hard drives, even if the 80GB ones are faster you wouldnt really notice., So why have less space and much less upgradeability.
 
Have a look at this paper from Seagate:
http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepaper/TP-539.pdf

Where they have 2-4 drives in RAID 0, the total throughput goes from 88.28MB per second for the two drives to 215.16MB per second for the four drives. This was a demonstration to prove that 4 drives connected in RAID 0 would exceed the original SATA specification, since each drive can usually do as much as 60MB/s. I was under the impression that adding more 60MB/s drives would do more than adding 8MB cache to the throughput, but there are so many other factors!

I would really be keen to see some proof of your theories, possibly benchmarks, especially real world benchmarks, loading games, loading apps etc. It's difficult to find benchmarks of 4xSATA vs 2xSATA configurations!
 
Last edited:
On the last page of the aricle, it reads:
"SATA 3Gb/s will clearly increase performance when system builders take advantage of aggregated bandwidth or multi-drive
configurations."

Basically, SATA 3gb/s is nowhere nearly achieved in a single drive, becaue each single drive can only reach about 60MB maximum of transfer, but when 4 drives are connected, you can reach 215MB (should be 240MB but other factors influence it aswell). So SATA 3gb/s is only really used in more than 3 drives, original SATA would max out at about 2-3 drives. The throughbut is actually mainly affected by the 3gb/s controller (Southbridge) ...
 
So it makes sense that this will be faster, but I still dont think it is nearly worth it to pay 25$ less for half the space and a bit more speed. Those 80GB drives are also possibly of the 7200.9 range of Seagates, making them slower than the 320GB as a single unit.

Interesting though, makes me want to buy more harddirves than just my single 320GB, I gues ill add more later. the problem with 4 80 gig drives is that its going to be hard to add much more space.
 
Hi,

Most guys put the drives in configurations of just 2 drives, there you don't really get the full potential (88MB vs. single drive 60MB), it's really when you go to 3 or 4 drives that it starts kicking ass (215.16MB vs. single drive 60MB)! SATA was MADE FOR RAID! Because the drives should be "seeking" while the one is reading, the more drives you have, the more time it gives them to "seek", so the latency is reduced and thus the files (preferably larger files) are accessed with almost no "seek" time. Anyway, that's the basic theory, but it deffinately helps having more drives in RAID 0 than just 2!

Other issues include, more power consumption, more heat, more risk of one drive failing (not too much of an issue if it's just games and non-critical data)
 
i got 2 x 320gb sata2 in raido 0... it really fly's... and these 320gb seagate drives are really faster than the 80's... so i recon go with the 320's... if you wanna go faster... get another 2 320's in the future..

btw my pc often loads faster in BF2 than most of the guys running with 4x drives in sata and most of the other dudes that have those 15k speed drives.
 
is it possible to add hard drives to a RAID 0 setup at a later stage? without losing all data?

reason is i got 2x250gb western digital 16mb hard drives......thinking bout future :rolleyes:
 
Four drives on raid 0? Only one needs to fail and all data will be gone :D

I was reading through a thread on another website (I think it was on the Overclockers forum, but I forgot). A common thing that the extremists do is that they have two partitions: an application partition (80gb or less) and a data partition (the remaining space).
The application partition is configured as a raid 0 array, while the data partition is configured as a raid 5 array. All data is stored on the raid 5 partition, including a backup of the application partition which can be restored if one of the drives fails. Remember, on a raid 5 array, at least two drives need to fail at the same time for data loss to occur, thus lowering the risk significantly.

I've got 2x Seagate 320s on raid 0 (only 1 partition) but am considering doing the above for the extra performance and lower risk.

EDIT: The raid 0 + raid 5 config assumes 4 drives in the thread I mentioned above (I'll try to dig up the link if anyone is interested)
 
Last edited:
my 2x250 gb hard drives i have partitioned into 80gigs for OS etc and the rest for Storage.........only raid 0 though, no raid 5 etc.....
 
This is just a quick update to this thread:

I bought 4x 250GB Seagate 7200.10 16MB cache SATA 3gb/s drives w/NCQ and configured them in RAID(0). I did an HD Tach benchmark on them vs. 2x SCSI Raptors (not the 2x 150GB SATA Raptors). Basically, my sustained reading beat them hands down, it will even beat the 150GB Raptors (as shown in other benchmarks in the second link), but obviously the Raptors beat me in Average Seek times! My setup should be a few hundred rands cheaper and give you 1TB of data!


Here is where I posted the benchmark:
http://www.systemshock.co.za/forums/index.php?showtopic=7959

Here is the harddrive benchmarking thread from other users with other setups:
http://www.systemshock.co.za/forums/index.php?showtopic=5525&hl=hard
 
Yes, think about 4x Raptors ... then think about the cost ... R8400

Then you wake up and it was all a dream!!!

PS: Videos, movies, guys capturing CCTV onto HDD etc. Many applications, but I don't need it for any one of those!

The reason I bought 4x 250GB drives was not for the capacity! It was for the RAID config! These are the cheapest 16MB cache SATA 3gb/s drives I could get ... hopefully they'll last a couple of years! SATA 6gb/s is only comming end of 2007 ... along with PCI-Express version 2
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X