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300GB Veliciraptor or 2x 74GB Seagate 15K.5 Cheetah's SAS RAID 0

Dkcode

Dkcode

Senior member
I am looking for the best solution all round. It's going to be for a desktop for everyday use and gaming.

The 300GB Velociraptor looks decent on paper over at storage review, especially when compared to the SAS Cheetah, but all those number's don't really mean much to me. It seems the Cheetah's are better suited to servers with multiple non local accesses.

I want a solution that will offer the fastest loading times, both loading the OS and loading games. Large data transfer rates are not really important to me. I have figured out two solutions so far:

ASUS P6T WS Pro with two 74GB 15K.5 Cheetah's in RAID 0
ASUS P6T with 1x 300GB Velociraptor

The former is more expensive but i like the idea of having workstation level parts (call me superficial). However i don't want to waste money on something that is going to offer me no substantial level of performance for what i use the machine for.

Your opinions are valued.

Cheers.
 
i have heard bad things about the onboard SAS on a lot of the LGA 1366 boards. apparently there is only one (a P6T model, i forget which) on which it actually WORKS, let alone works in RAID. the places i have looked at have 300GB SAS cheetahs running at about $325, which is considerably more than 1 Vraptor at $230, and also quite a bit faster, without the latency penalty having 2 drives in RAID together incurs. i find generally the best place for RAID0 is when you want massive sequential transfer rates, and that for access times having a single fast drive is more practical and easier to set up. I have a friend who is using 2 Samsung 750gb enterprise class SATA drives (a step or 2 above F1s), and he was impressed at how fast my system booted with my single Vraptor. bottom line, if you can get a single 300GB cheetah going without onboard controller issues, go for it. if not, just get a 300GB vraptor and call it a day, it's not worth the hastle


ed: and for the record, 150gb~ isnt enough for OS + apps imo. i have a 150GB vraptor and the thing is just to damn small for my needs. unfortunately i didnt have enough for the 300GB drive at time time, so im making do and uninstalling every game after i have played through the story mode once, keeping only the ones i want to play regularly
 
Cheers faxon,

I am going to stick with my single 150GB Raptop this time round i think. It is big enough for my needs as i am a bit of a minimalist when it comes to apps, the only thing that annoys me is the noise. Its like having a diesel engine in my rig 😀
 
Just as a thought, not owning a VRaptor anymore, but my main pc does have a 8x 15k rpm 2.5" drive raid 5 main array (Savvios) and a 3x 300GB 15k.5 Raid 5 array...

Get the VRaptor(s). They are more optimized for your usage pattern. The SAS train will soon get you thinking about more drives and a dedicated controller... which gets more and more expensive. Also, the 15k.5's run HOT and I can't imagine that two 15k.5's would consume less power than a 2.5" VRaptor. 15k.5's are solid performing single user drives, but if you do really heavy multi-tasking, (i.e. if you are the kind of gamer that is dowloading Win 7 RC1, while playing games, backing up to an external NAS server, and doing multimedia encoding/rendering...) then the 15k.5's really shine. That is not most people though.
 
If you want mid range workstation parts go with Areca 1680 series with 2GB cache and 2-4 15K SAS drives to start. I would not use the onboard SAS controller on the P6T6. It's a sin they put SATA connectors on that! A pair of miniSAS connectors would allow for 8 drives on that controller which is supported but you need expanders which are expensive. It's a dumb controller (no DPU/cache management etc.) so not nearly the performance of the IOP based solutions.
 
actually, the samsung 750's are F1's I believe. perfomance is good, but I am not using the crappy onboard SAS controller, I am using ICH10R on a UD5, which is decent. If you want raid, use a good dedicated SAS or SATA controller, or a GOOD onboard SATA controller, like ICH10R. SAS probably not worth it. or, instead of raid, you could just get 1 fast drive, like an SSD, Vraptor, or larger performance drive like the caviar blacks or spinpoint F1's.

since the load times are > transfer for you, single drive sounds best.
 
ah really? you told me they were higher end than the F1 model before. maybe im just spacing out lol
 
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