10,000 RPM vs. RAID

[atchon]

I was wondering which setup would perform better speedwise or if there would even be a noticeable difference. Its between a single 10,000 RPM SATA 150 drive or 2 SATA 3.0 Gb/s raided together. I know the RAID would give me a bit more space for the same price as the 10,000 rpm. I currently have 2 80GB 3.0 Gb/s raided together, but I'm running low on space but I really don't need a whole lot more so a 30 GB 10,000 rpm would be fine as would any RAID setup.

Any opinions would be greatly appreciated. The harddrive would be my primary one as well as I plan to do a clean install on both my current drives and the new one.

 

[TriggerHappy101]

I would like to know this also. I have one 320gb Seagate SATA 3.0GB/s and was wondering if it would be benificial to add anther 320gb in raid 0.

 

[ch33zw1z]

The amount of performance you will see is negligible compared to all that data lost when a disk fails. If you do have all your data stored elsewhere, not on the array, then it's worth the time.

If you get a 16MB 74GB Raptor for you OS, you will not be disappointed!

 

[atchon]

Yea disk failure wouldn't be a real problem, I backup everything onto 2 external harddrives, I'm leaning towards the 10k RPM raptor have you ever used a RAID with 3.0 Gb/s before? any comparison?

Also what about SCSI would a 15k RPM run through a PCI SCSI controller be even worth looking into or would that be overkill for home use.

 

[ch33zw1z]

1. RAID 0 w/ SATAII would leave the drives read/write times as the bottleneck. You may be able to use half the bandwidth at peak perfomance. the Raptors have faster read/writes, but are not SATAII, so limited to 150MB/s instead. I'm sure that 2xSATAII drives would be comparable to 1 Raptor.

2. 15k SCSI setup isn't overkill(still pricey), but the PCI bus would hinder it's performance.

 

[StopSign]

Since when is 150 MB/s a bottleneck?

 

[ch33zw1z]

It's not, yet! I almost hit 150 on a single 74GB 16MB Raptor though...it may not be far off..

 

[StopSign]

Almost 150 MB/s sustained transfer? That's hard to believe. You're talking about burst, right?

 

[ch33zw1z]

Yes, the burst speed.

 

[twitchee2]

yea have 2 320 seagates in raid 0, the are faster then my 2 8mb raptors i had. burst is not as fast but its really not noticeable at all.

 

[m1ldslide1]

I ran two 80 gig WD's in raid0 for a while, and didn't really notice any speed increase over just one. Although the only thing I was doing was booting windows and loading games, so I'm probably not the best example. It all comes down to what you're going to do with them.

 

[billyjak]

I had raid O installed many times, and it was a little faster than my raptors, but not much. I would advise against raid O as when it goes it goes and your so out of luck. and it does go.
Good luck

 

[SickBeast]

The Raptors are overrated IMO. If you get a top performing 7,200RPM SATA drive, you will barely notice a difference between it and the Raptor. Not only that, but the faster 7,200 drives outperform the Raptors in quite a few areas.

RAID is also overrated and only really helps with transferring very large files, which does not reflect normal usage. Most files are less than 1MB, which negates most of the benefit that RAID provides.

 

[atchon]

Thanks for everyones comments, One further question I looked on ebay and it looks like you can pick up some cheap 15k rpm SCSI drives low capacity the only thing i can see is they have 3.6 ms 16 bit memory interface and buffer size of 8. How would two of these setup on a cheap RAID card perform compare to 2 SATA 3.0 Gb/s in RAID ?

One of the reasons I like RAID is i do transfer relatively large files on a daily basis and I have seen a noticeable speed increase with my current SATA RAID compared to the IDE drive I use to use.

 

[SickBeast]

For large file transfers the 15K drives won't make much difference. The higher rotational speed helps with seek times but not much else.

That said, I would take a 15K cheetah over any Raptor, provided that the cost was the same.

 

[docinthebox]

Advantage of 10k and 15k drives: Fast seek time - useful for random access (reading a lot of different files all over the drive). Transfer rate is fast too.

Advantage of RAID-0: Fast transfer rate. (Sum of transfer rates of the individual drives in the array). But NOT faster seek time. You won't improve the seek time a bit no matter how many drives you stripe.

So, I would recommend:

1. For the boot drive, use a Raptor or better yet, a 15k scsi.
2. For the data drives, use RAID-0 array of 7200rpm drives.

 

[Blain]

"Burst speed"... "Average sustained speed"... Yadda Yadda Yadda...

> How to Lie With Statistics

 

[StopSign]

Originally posted by: docinthebox
2. For the data drives, use RAID-0 array of 7200rpm drives.

I strongly disagree with that.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: StopSign

Originally posted by: docinthebox
2. For the data drives, use RAID-0 array of 7200rpm drives.

I strongly disagree with that.

Originally posted by: atchon
disk failure wouldn't be a real problem, I backup everything onto 2 external harddrives

 

[StopSign]

English is my second language.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: StopSign
English is my second language.

?:roll:?:roll:?

Do you "strongly disagree" with RAID 0 for his data because of drive failure?

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: SickBeast
The Raptors are overrated IMO. If you get a top performing 7,200RPM SATA drive, you will barely notice a difference between it and the Raptor. Not only that, but the faster 7,200 drives outperform the Raptors in quite a few areas.

Wrong, and I'm willing to bet that you've never actually had a personal system with a new 7200rpm drive and a raptor. My new machine that I built loads everything slower than my old machine (both are fairly speedy machines, but the newer one definitely has the better components (sans the HDD)). The HDDs being used on the two machines are a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB (OS is partitioned off) and a 74GB Raptor.

The differences are why a 150GB Raptor is being delivered to me today from NewEgg .

 

[Fallen Kell]

Originally posted by: Aikouka

Originally posted by: SickBeast
The Raptors are overrated IMO. If you get a top performing 7,200RPM SATA drive, you will barely notice a difference between it and the Raptor. Not only that, but the faster 7,200 drives outperform the Raptors in quite a few areas.

Wrong, and I'm willing to bet that you've never actually had a personal system with a new 7200rpm drive and a raptor. My new machine that I built loads everything slower than my old machine (both are fairly speedy machines, but the newer one definitely has the better components (sans the HDD)). The HDDs being used on the two machines are a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB (OS is partitioned off) and a 74GB Raptor.

The differences are why a 150GB Raptor is being delivered to me today from NewEgg .

I agree completely on this. It is also why I have a 150 GB Raptor and 4x 500 GB Seagates going into my new rig. The Seagates will be RAID 5 on a dedicated RAID card (Promise SuperTrak EX8350).

 

[StopSign]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: StopSign
English is my second language.

?:roll:?:roll:?

Do you "strongly disagree" with RAID 0 for his data because of drive failure?

Yes, but I didn't see that he was backing everything up.

 

[atchon]

Thanks everyone for your input, I'm going to order a Raptor to give that a shot see how it performs, and as luck would have it I was talking to one of my friends about this and he said he had an SCSI drive laying around, so I will be able to compare both now.