1X500GB or 2x250GB RAID-0?

HenryJ said:
That is quite a thorough test there. Raptor did not perform as well as I had thought on the whole..
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Yip, the premium that you pay for a Raptor for such a slight increase in performance is retarded. The benchies show that the 11 series in a RAID array are very fast and are without a doubt comparable to the Raptors.

The only thing that puts people off is the whole reliability issue which doesn't really make sense to me because the probability of a RAID array failing is the same as the probability of 1 in 2 single drives failing, only difference is how much data is lost if the drive were to fail, which as I said becomes moot when you do regular full and incremental backups using Acronis.
 
henry ppl think raptors tranfer data faster

thats not the point of a raptor, a raptor has half the seek time of any 7200 hdd's

basically take photoshop and open it, it will open twice as fast on a raptor

windows runs faster

its about seek time

the reason i raided my raptors is to get the transfer rate up to 7200 rpm

feo have u ever used a raptor? they are testing transfer which is not the strong point of raptors

believe me guys you dont pay 1.6k for a drive that offers minimal, your paying for your computer to be more responsive and faster and open application way faster

at the end of the day you guys are reading reviews and have no tested raid0 or raptors for yourself

try a raptor one day, it'll blow your mind with the speed


check raptor load vista time, 4 seconds faster than the other drives, thats what its good at

now imagine photoshop, it takes maybe 5 second to open with a normal drive, a raptor will do it in half the time
write/read is a raptors main problem but you dont even notice it for normal pc use :)

Since we have already discussed the clear advantage of sustained throughput on the Seagate drive. We can now take a closer look at Random Access time on both drives. There is a clear 54% advantage when using the Raptor in random read situations on the drive. For those of you unfamiliar with random I/O's, it is the majority of OS operation when not writing to the drive. Example: Booting the OS, booting applications/games, reading from the page file. The closer your RAT (Random Access Time) is to "0" the quicker and more fluid your operating system environment will appear to be.
 
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3k for a pair of 74gb WD raptors? No thank you. I'd rather add more tom and get me 2 x 9600gt's, FTW!!!
 
Or maybe buy a 64gb solid state drive, will kick the raptor do death :) That'll be worth it!
 
those solid state drives are only sdd

when a solid state drive comes out im buying it

i have bought many things for my pc and the best and my most favoured part is my raptors

i was actually going to sell them to buy watercooling, but i thought let me get 2 seagate 80 gig drives and raid them

wow i was shocked how much slower my pc was that i never sold em and it showed me the true speed of these beauties :)

ppl always think vga ram gpu, never think HDD

you okes can make your choice but i love the speed of my pc, its so fast, corel photoshop all open way faster than they did when i have 7200's drives
 
My opinion of RAID0, as expressed by Luis Villazon:

Suppose someone advertised their disk drive as twice as expensive, half as reliable and slightly faster - would you buy it?
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That man is a genius :D
 
WKJ?:beanie said:
My opinion of RAID0, as expressed by Luis Villazon:

Suppose someone advertised their disk drive as twice as expensive, half as reliable and slightly faster - would you buy it?
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Twice as expensive?

Not really, if you RAID-0 2 500GB hard drives, you're getting a 1TB logical drive and you're paying for 1TB worth of usable space, that argument only really holds some ground when talking about RAID-1 where you're essentially using the 2nd drive as a mirror and not usable free space.

Half as reliable?

Each drive has the same chance of failing whether they are raided or not. The logical drive might have double the chance of failing yes, but that's irreleavant if you backup frequently and properly (which you're meant to do in any case).

Slightly faster?

Check the previous pages for some linkage for some evidence to the contrary.
 
feo said:
Twice as expensive?

Not really, if you RAID-0 2 500GB hard drives, you're getting a 1TB logical drive and you're paying for 1TB worth of usable space, that argument only really holds some ground when talking about RAID-1 where you're essentially using the 2nd drive as a mirror and not usable free space.

Half as reliable?

Each drive has the same chance of failing whether they are raided or not. The logical drive might have double the chance of failing yes, but that's irreleavant if you backup frequently and properly (which you're meant to do in any case).

Slightly faster?

Check the previous pages for some linkage for some evidence to the contrary.
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Well, on the twice as expensive front, I think that you'll buy two drives for the performance benefits that RAID0 offers, not for storage. So you have to pay for two drives for performance instead of one. Not that I'm saying you wouldn't construct a RAID0 array for common, everyday data storage mind you :)

As for failing, any drive should be backed up as frequently as possible, however it doesn't take away the reliability risks associated with RAID0. Just offers the same way of retrieving the data that normal drives do. A RAID0 array still has twice the chance of losing all of your data than two normal hard drives run independently.

I do realize that "slightly faster" was a bit of an understatement, but bear in mind that this comment was made back in 2004 if I recall correctly :D

I suppose it comes down to a personal preference in this case: If I had enough money for two hard drives, I'd use them as two hard drives just because of the risks involved with using a RAID0 array. If I had enough money that the cost of hard drives aren't an issue, then I'd be happily constructing a RAID0 array :D
 
Lol, I cannot understand whats so difficult for some to understand. @ killa, you're happy with your raid cos u running raptors. If any1 else has non-raptor raid 0 and has a significant gain in performance, please post here. IMO, it's just not worth running the risk and performance for raid 0 ;)
 
xeo i had normal raid 0 7200 rpm before my raptors and it was faster than one 7200 drive, why dont the guys who dont believe in raid 0 test for themselves and determine for themselves if its worth it or not

trust me man i have been using raid for a long time now, bought my first raptors 1 year ago and my second one 4 months ago, the other 2 years i used 7200 80 gig drives

also this reliability stuff is rubbish, your taking 2 drives and making it 1 so logically if one fails if like losing a 500gb hdd as its one drive and not 2

if your 500 gb fails your in no better a situation than your 320 gig raid config going

raid does not make a drive fail more frequently, like i said you have more chance of your motherboard dying than you do your raid config

i suggest the okes who dont believe in raid 0, give it a bash

you wont be sorry :)
 
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killadoob said:
xeo i had normal raid 0 7200 rpm before my raptors and it was faster than one 7200 drive, why dont the guys who dont believe in raid 0 test for themselves and determine for themselves if its worth it or not

trust me man i have been using raid for a long time now, bought my first raptors 1 year ago and my second one 4 months ago, the other 2 years i used 7200 80 gig drives

also this reliability stuff is rubbish, your taking 2 drives and making it 1 so logically if one fails if like losing a 500gb hdd as its one drive and not 2

if your 500 gb fails your in no better a situation than your 320 gig raid config going

raid does not make a drive fail more frequently, like i said you have more chance of your motherboard dying than you do your raid config

i suggest the okes who dont believe in raid 0, give it a bash

you wont be sorry :)
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Sounds like an idea. There is only so much we can talk about it...
 
Wow this thread has become quite interesting lol :)

As mentioned back on the first page, I'm running RAID0 at work on 2 200GB Seagate 7200.9 series SATA disks, using the server's onboard Intel controller. It works fine, and I backup to an external eSATA hard drive using Acronis (USB transfer rates suck, I have to back up almost 65 gigs of data, so eSATA rocks)

To be honest, it's not easy to tell whether there is a speed boost by using RAID0. The only reason I put it in RAID0 was because I didn't know as much back then as I do now. Given the choice now, I would just leave the 2 drives single and not RAID them. If I didn't have a backup of the data, and one drive goes down, everything becomes lost.

Since the operating system is not aware of hardware RAID, you have no idea which disk the data is being written to. Logically it could be "C:\StaffDocs" but physically one file is on the one drive and one on the other.

Also, there are 3 types of RAID that I can tell: Software, Semi Hardware, and Hardware
  • Software - Using the features under Windows or Linux to create logical arrays
  • Semi Hardware - Uses onboard controllers on the motherboard, but still uses up host CPU power
  • Hardware: Dedicated controller that has its own processor and sometimes a battery backup

Killadoob is right about Raptors and seek time, that is what they shine at. But unless you are doing his kind of work, rather get normal hard drives and don't bother to RAID them.

Also, most new hard drives' platters are far more dense then they used to be, which helps to increase speed. A one platter 200Gig will be fater than a 2 platter one.

Once again just my 2c :)
 
I fully agree with you, however if you've read the entire thread you would have discovered that you should not be agreeing with killad, he maintains that raid 0 is worth it even with 7200 hard drives. The rest of us disagree ;)
 
ok zeo lets check dis :)

killa says its better
xeo, has not tried it
ashman uses it on a server which is pointless
marine says its does not help, has not tried it
feo has not tried it :)

who else says its not worth that has actually tried it :)

try it first then come back to me and tell me its makes no difference

try raid 0, then go reload windows and tell me it does not load way faster, then just do your everyday stuff and come back and tell me your pc is not faster :)

majority are disagreeing with someone they never had never tried
 
Ahem, er, you're clearly not paying attention Mr. Killad, now I'll have to take you to the back of the class for a solid spanking :p Again, if you've read each post you would have discovered that I ran raid 0 with 2 x 80gb, and since there was no significant gain in performance, I saw no need to waste one 80gb on raid :) Again, if I was running raptors, I'm sure there would have been a decent increase in performance, but the tom required for that is not worth it IMHO ;)
 
oic missed that one :)

oooooooooooooo have no been spanked before, well not by a guy atleast :p

i dunno it would cool for ppl who has not tested to run raid and get some views going on the topic :)
 
killadoob said:
i dunno it would cool for ppl who has not tested to run raid and get some views going on the topic :)
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Looks like myself and HenryJ are gonna give RAID-0 a bash.

I'm just gonna do a bit of research first into what sort of performance increases I can expect by RAIDing a pair of 160GB, 200GB and 250GB drives and go for the option that'll give me the best "bang for my buck". RAIDing a non-rpator drive is definitely worth it and it'll be interesting to see stats that back it up.
 
look raiding raptors is not worth it, what raiding 2 raptors does is it helps the raptors bad transfer rates and makes the transfer go up

meaning that raptors biggest problem is slow transfer rate, raiding 2 raptors makes the raptors not only fast in seeking but fast in transfer

in saying this, the best 3.2k i have ever spent has been on my 2 raptors :)

my 22" 9800gx2 q660 etc all take a back seat to my beloved raptor raid :)
 
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