2 questions on Raid 0.....

[theNEOone]

Question #1

I'm currently looking at putting the Western Digital SE drives in a raid 0 array. Should I expect a similar performance increase between raid 0 on 'normal' hard drives and raid 0 on the SE drives that people see when they compare regular drives to the 8mb cache WD drives that are not in a raid array? The reason I ask this is because Best Buy is offering the WD 2mb 120gig drives for $110. I'm looking at closing a deal on FS/FT on the 80gig 8mb for either $105 or on Newegg for $116. So my options are:

Option 1: 2x120gig 2mb Cache WD drives
Option 2: 2x80gig 8mb Cache WD SE drives

I'm not in desperate need for space. I currently have 120gigs on my system and have about 10gigs free. I'm looking into this raid setup for digital video editing and a general improvement in system performance. The 240gigs (If I do go w/ them) would definitely be overkill for now. Might be something of an investment for the future.


Question #2

Will I be able to partition my raid 0 drives? Does anybody have any links to a good raid 0 FAQ?

 

[Woodchuck2000]

I'm not entirely sure about the relative performance. I'd definitely go for the 120Gig drives. A 50% increase in space for such a small percentage cost increase has to be worth it.

As far as partitioning goes; if you're using hardware RAID, it will be treated by your OS as a single volume and you'll be able to partition it however you like

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: Woodchuck2000
I'm not entirely sure about the relative performance. I'd definitely go for the 120Gig drives. A 50% increase in space for such a small percentage cost increase has to be worth it.

As far as partitioning goes; if you're using hardware RAID, it will be treated by your OS as a single volume and you'll be able to partition it however you like

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Damn; 240GB of storage....:Q Prolly about 220-225 after formating/partitioning.

I'm not a big fan of partitions, BUT if I had a 220GB drive (!) I'd sure as heck partition it. How...I dunno.

You'll like RAID0; it is faster than a single HD.

 

[Megatomic]

Originally posted by: MichaelD

Originally posted by: Woodchuck2000
I'm not entirely sure about the relative performance. I'd definitely go for the 120Gig drives. A 50% increase in space for such a small percentage cost increase has to be worth it.

As far as partitioning goes; if you're using hardware RAID, it will be treated by your OS as a single volume and you'll be able to partition it however you like

I'm not a big fan of partitions, BUT if I had a 220GB drive (!) I'd sure as heck partition it. How...I dunno.

You'll like RAID0; it is faster than a single HD.

I feel the same way. I have two 40GB Maxtor ATA133 drives in RAID 0 and they are much faster as a RAID drive than they were separately. I love it.

 

[Deeko]

You'd get better performance if you went with the 8mb drives, but RAID is already fast enough, so I'd go with the 120GB drives, that's 80GB more space :Q

 

[techfuzz]

I'm looking into this raid setup for digital video editing and a general improvement in system performance.

I believe you would be better off getting the WD SE 8MB cache drives based on what you said. Digital video would directly benefit from the 8MB cache that the SE drives provide. RAID 0 does provide a small bit of performance gain over standalone non-RAID drives.

techfuzz

 

[theNEOone]

Hmmm, i was on the verge of hopping on the 120 drives before that last comment. Can you explain why the 8mb cache caters specifically to performance needs of digital video editiing?

 

[techfuzz]

Originally posted by: theNEOone
Hmmm, i was on the verge of hopping on the 120 drives before that last comment. Can you explain why the 8mb cache caters specifically to performance needs of digital video editiing?

The following is from the WD Press Release dated April 15, 2002:
The WD Caviar 80 GB Special Edition 8 MB buffer hard drives provide a higher percentage of cache hits and significantly faster time to data than industry-standard 2 MB versions. The larger buffer improves performance because there is a reduction in the number of physical accesses to the disk. This allows data to stream from the disk uninterrupted by mechanical operations. With additional buffer resources, read and write commands are more quickly queued and served to the user.

In the case of digital video editing, video is pre-fetched into the cache and is ready to be streamed for processing. Because of the average size of digital video files is quite large, the extra cache on the special edition drives naturally make them better performers than their 2MB counterparts because they are able to cache more data and thus increases the responsiveness of the drive (and overall performance of the computer).

techfuzz