A newb needs your help

[kik1drum]

I am building a new system and planning on buying a couple of 74G Raptors for a raid0. Is the raid best used for os and apps or data or both. I don't do gaming, but use my system for video editing,music compilations, and burning to dvd. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks::music:

 

[Rike]

Welcome to the forums!

Read this before you buy.

IMHO, RAID 0 is a waste of good money. I'd buy one Raptor and a 300Gb Seagate instead. OS and active projects on the Raptor and the 300GB for storage.

 

[Stiganator]

I would reccomend not running raid 0 with the raptors. Anand has an article on it, they are slower inr RAID 0 iirc. If you need faster than that, really the only options are maxtor III line or 15K scsi, both of which are spendy. Theoretically, RAID 0 on any system should be faster, but anand and others (storage review) have shown it to be false. Plus its a hassle if a drive fails. If you want bragging right do it, you can run raid 0 on everthing I suppose, but if you're data is important, don't risk it.

 

[kik1drum]

That's what I'm doing now. I have one 36G raptor for os and apps and one Western digital 250G sata for storage. Thanks for the info.:music:

 

[kik1drum]

Thanks for the info. Are the maxtors with the 16mb cache a good choice for storage? I'm wanting to try maxtor, been using WD sata 250G.

 

[bfonnes]

Originally posted by: Rike

IMHO, RAID 0 is a waste of good money.

If you want a RAID setup try "0+1", but 0 is no good.

BFonnes

 

[w00t]

i was gonna get raid 0 for raptors till i found out not fast. than i found out the raptors were only a lil bit faster and would only install stuff faster and extract its just a waste of money just get a nice 80gb hd 7,200rpm

 

[beatle]

Anything with a good warranty is good for storage, IMO.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: kik1drum
Thanks for the info. Are the maxtors with the 16mb cache a good choice for storage? I'm wanting to try maxtor, been using WD sata 250G.

Only if you have a motherboard that supports NCQ (Native Command Queuing). Those boards would be Nforce 4 based and 915/925 series boards. Even then the Raptors are still faster, go Raptor unless you really need space.

RAID isn't really worth it unless you want bragging rights.

-Kevin

 

[Rike]

Originally posted by: beatle
Anything with a good warranty is good for storage, IMO.

In that case, Seagate just upped their warranty to five years. And I think that's retroactive on drives sold in the last year.

Edit: It's five years on drives in the retail channel since June 1, 2004. Full article here.

 

[uOpt]

Of course RAID0 will be faster, up until the bandwidth of your PCI bus. A single raptor won't max out the PCI bus.

But you understand what happens to your data when even one of the drives fails, do you?

RAID0 gives a pretty much unconditional speedup, so there's nothing in the way of which data to put on it. Except you only put data on it that can live with the reduced statistical lifespan.

Also note that some cheap hardware RAID seems to be pretty much junk, but software RAID will do fine.

 

[SadisticOne]

The best (and IMO only) use for RAID0 is impermanent storage of intermediate media files (like 3d rendering, where the results would be transferred to optical media or redundant HDDs,) or storage of workspaces/views on a data warehouse, or a big SQL Server installation, where the lifespan of the data is in minutes.