ATA or Serial Hard Drives

borgmang

Senior member
Jun 27, 2003
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I'm building a new system and was wondering which hard drives to get for a raid system. System will be P4 2.8C - OC'd

1. Seagate serial drives
2. Western Digital Raptor serial drives
3. Western Digital Caviar 8mb special edition drives
 

joshg

Golden Member
Jul 3, 2001
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I don't think getting a SATA drive that's 7200RPM will be much (read: probably none at all) of a performance boost. If you are wanting more performance out of your Hard drive and you still want to keep EIDE then Raptor is the only truly "increased" performance option at this point.

Also, have no idea of your budget constraints so I can't tell you what's "best" for you ;)

It would be 2 if you have all the money that you need, or 3 if you are on a tight budget.

By the way, your title is a little redundant, too. :D Serial is also ATA. The "new" interface is Serial ATA, while the "old" was Parallel ATA, or, "PATA". Just FYI there :)
 

borgmang

Senior member
Jun 27, 2003
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I don't want to waste money, I just want the best bang/value for my buck. The only thing I don't like about the Raptor is the small 36gb size. I'm also, going to mod a new case w/ windows and lighting and I want the cables and everything to look clean.

What and how can I set-up a 4 drive Raid system.

Thanks for the FYI on the title.
 

BurnItDwn

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
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Raptor also carries a 5 year warranty ...


if you want cheap storage ... than go with WD Caviar SE drives ... get the 3 year warranty, and great performance

If you want nice fast drives, but dont need a lot of space, and you plan on not needing to upgrade for a long time ... Raptor is for you .... Personally I'd go with some WDSE drives ... cause I like my space
 

joshg

Golden Member
Jul 3, 2001
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I have to say that if I had enough money, my system would have 2x Raptors in RAID 0 and then 1 WD SE drive of either 120GB or 200GB... that way you get really fast OS, Apps, and data that you want fast, and then a whole lotta general storage on the PATA drive. :D
 

tallman45

Golden Member
May 27, 2003
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Do you have the Raid controllers ? If not then these need to be factored into your equation.

Next, what will be on the Raid ?

Your best bang for the buck is running ATA SE. Check the manufacturer of the Raid controller for compatability.

Remember that Raid 0 arrays start slowly then really shine with large files such as digital imaging or video. OS boot times are not much faster if at all on a Raid. They are much faster on a single Raptor vs an IDE Raid

Lastly there is not much perf gain between a 2 drive raid vs a 4 drive raid.
 

borgmang

Senior member
Jun 27, 2003
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I'm going to be building a P4 2.8C w/ Asus P4 800E Deluxe mobo. I was planing on using the Asus onboard Raid that offers - "RAID: Dual Channel 133/100/66/33 up to 4 Devices & SATA". I've never set-up a raid before, so I'm not sure if it's worth it.

What I really want is, good performance for gaming, graphics, and video, but I also want a lot of storage.

Does it make sense to install 1 raptor as the main drive and 1 or 2 or 3 ATA SE drives, or maybe 2 raptors and 1 or 2 ATA SE drives? If so, can I use the ATA SE 250gb drives (or any other recomendations). Also, is it better to set-up a raid or just run all the drives single or maybe 1 raid and 1 or 2 single drives.

I've never ran a system with 2 drives or more, and I was wondering what's the best way to install programs for each drive?

Is it better to just run the OS only on the first drive by itself, or a portion/partition of the first drive? If so, do you then put all of your programs on another drive, and then put all your data, on say the third and fourth drive?

Sorry - this is new to me, but I want to order my drives this week if possible.

Thanks for everybody's help on this.
 

0roo0roo

No Lifer
Sep 21, 2002
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Originally posted by: joshg
I have to say that if I had enough money, my system would have 2x Raptors in RAID 0 and then 1 WD SE drive of either 120GB or 200GB... that way you get really fast OS, Apps, and data that you want fast, and then a whole lotta general storage on the PATA drive. :D

well if i had unlimited money i'd want 2 drives on stripe raid 0 and one more mirroring it :) most controllres can pull that off right? 0+1?

course then i'd only have a lousy 36gb.

i'd need a 2nd raid controller to raid 1 2 300gb drives for storage:)

remember, raid 0 u got double chance of failure!
 

boomerang

Lifer
Jun 19, 2000
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If you put two 36GB drives in RAID 0, you have 72GB total. It will be seen as one drive.

Personally, I don't need a lot of storage. I have two Raptor's in RAID 0 with my OS, apps, data and all on them. I have a EIDE drive for backup.

Using the latest version of Powerquest Drive Image 7.0, I have scheduled Drive Image to automatically back up my RAID array once a day. The coolest thing being that it does it from Windows. No rebooting. And I continue on doing what I'm doing while it does it automatically. I'm only using about 9GB of the array and it takes less than 6 minutes to create an image of the drive.

There is a very noticeable difference in load times for apps. It has speeded up my boot times. These drives are quiet. Only a 1 degree difference in case temperature. I'm extremely happy with these drives.

I have a fourth drive that I hope to install Red Hat on if I ever get the time.:D
 

borgmang

Senior member
Jun 27, 2003
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So after the raid is set-up there will be only one 72GB drive that shows up to install to? Then install everything to that one drive? Where do you think I should store my graphics and video data - on third drive or the raptors? Some of the data gets quite large at times.
 

0roo0roo

No Lifer
Sep 21, 2002
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it should show as one drive in windows. as for storage, raid is for speed, not storage.
 

Sunner

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
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What are you looking for in the drive?
Pure performance, go Raptor or WD JB series.
Price/performance/noise, I'd say a Hitachi 180GXP 8MB version(for the extra warranty) would suit you nicely.
Or maybe a Barracuda 7200.7, even more silent, respectable performance, S-ATA, 3 year warranty.
 

thorin

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Originally posted by: borgmang
Whatt about a 4 drive system - Raptor for main drive and 3 Western Digital drives?
1 Raptor as your main drive (or two Raptors in RAID even btr) and 2 WD SEs in RAID would be frickin sweet!

Thorin

 

borgmang

Senior member
Jun 27, 2003
335
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thorin,

For best performance use 2 raptors as Raid 0? Then use 2 WD SEs in Raid 1?

All others please comment as well.

Thanks
 

boomerang

Lifer
Jun 19, 2000
18,883
641
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Raptors in RAID 0 yes.

RAID 1 is for security. The same data is written to both drives. If one fails, the other can take over or is available to take over. Whether you put drives in RAID 1 is strictly up to you.
 

daniel1113

Diamond Member
Jun 6, 2003
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Speaking of WD SATA drives... does anyone know when they may be producing 120GB (or close to that) versions of their 8mb SATA drives? I know the 250GB is coming, but I would like to replace my 3 120GB Caviar SE drives with SATA to get rid of the IDE cables as soon as possible. Thanks.
 

tallman45

Golden Member
May 27, 2003
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Your fastest access drive should be designated for your OS/apps, the slowest drive should be for backup/archive. With smaller files such as read/writes from OS/apps, you will see very little if anthing at all by putting them on a Raid 0 array. Raid 0 loads arrays thrive with read/writes of very large files (video/photo's).

Best possible real world performance that you can see would be to use Raptors individually on their own channel, one for OS, one for Apps. Have some big IDE drives on a third channel as backup/archive. All data would be safe, and no bottlenecks or contention between the drives.

If you really want to go with a safer Raid look at a 4 drive Raid 0+1 setup.
 

tallman45

Golden Member
May 27, 2003
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Optimally you would use 4 identical drives, one pair stripes the data hence offering the performance potential of Raid 0, the second pair mirrors the first pair, hence offering the recoverability of Raid 1. Remember that with Raid 0 a drive failure all of the data is lost on all of the drives in that array. In Raid 1 the bad drive can be swapped out with no loss of data. In a 4 drive Raid 0+1 you would only realize the performance benefit as if you built a 2 drive Raid 0 array.
 

boomerang

Lifer
Jun 19, 2000
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Guys, can you do a 0+1 with three drives? I believe I can do that with my P4PE, but am a little nervous to try. Even with my backup.
 

lameaway

Member
Jun 18, 2003
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Well, no, 3 drives cannot make up a RAID 0+1 array. They can, however, function much like a RAID 0+1 using a more advanced standard, RAID 5. Two of the drives would be striped data drives and the third drive would be used for parity information that can be used to reconstruct the array if one of the other two drives fails. Naturally, if the parity drive fails, it can be reconstructed from the raw data on the other 2 drives. The disadvantage of RAID 5 is that it requires more processing power calculate parity and hence requires a more expensive controller and/or more CPU overhead.... as for overall throughput as opposed to 0+1, i have no idea, i'd guess that depends heavily on your RAID controller.