Best Hard Drive performanc?

[Byteboy]

I'm looking for some performance info on which of these setups would provide the best hard drive performance. This computer would be for gaming and games like AOC which comes out pretty soon.

A) 2X(Raid 0) Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb
B) 1X WD Velociraptor
C) 4X(Raid 0) Seagate Barracuda 340GB

I'm leaning twards the option A but would be curious as to how its performance would be against B and C..?

Thanks,

 

[Urtho]

Take a single drive from option A and you're all done. RAID 0 has very minimal performance benefits with significant potential drawbacks. See this link for more detailed info.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Byteboy
I'm looking for some performance info on which of these setups would provide the best hard drive performance.

A) 2X(Raid 0) Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb
B) 1X WD Velociraptor
C) 4X(Raid 0) Seagate Barracuda 340GB

If you are looking for pure performance and don't care about data integrity, go for either RAID option.
But if you care about your data go for the VelociRaptor.
I forget the exact percentage, but a striped RAID array increases your potential for data loss like 72-84.5% or something.

 

[HumblePie]

or you can do what I did. Get a raptor for your programs and a good drive for your data. I have a few raptors in RAID 0 but only my OS, games, and programs get loaded on it. I have a 640 WD drive for all my data like video, music, and what not.

 

[Roguestar]

Originally posted by: AnandTech HD Review 2007
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast loading times
The results speak for themselves with the RAID 0 setups offering extremely minor performance improvements in actual game load testing. You will likely not be able to notice any differences during actual game play with a RAID 0 setup. We know it was impossible for us.

BF2 Daqing Oilfields loading times
Once again we see a minimal difference between our RAID 0 and single drive configurations in this benchmark with only a one second difference in load times. In repeated testing it was difficult to discern any differences between the RAID 0 and single drive setups.

Nero Recoding
If you do a lot of video encoding then RAID 0 could end up saving you some precious minutes each day. Is it worth the cost or effort? Probably not, but it is one area besides benchmarking where RAID 0 actually made a difference. Of course, if you don't already have the fastest CPU for encoding available, that would have a far greater impact than RAID 0.

File Copying
We finish our tests with a benchmark that should have favored the RAID 0 setups due to a pure write scenario. Unlike our iPeak test (and for that matter a similar test in PCMark05) where the largest differences in scores between setups were generated, we have RAID 0 making no difference in this test and actually scoring worse than a single drive setup in two instances.

Final Thoughts
If it is not obvious by now, RAID 0 will provide outstanding results in synthetic benchmarks but really does nothing in actual applications.
RAID 0 sounds impressive in a system configuration and provides a performance placebo effect when viewing synthetic benchmarks. However, RAID 0 is just not worth the trouble or cost for the average desktop user or gamer, especially with the software RAID capabilities included on most motherboards.

AnandTech RAID-0 Raptor Review 2008
If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

 

[themisfit610]

Those benchmarks are retarded - unless all you really do is play games and copy files from a single drive to a RAID or vice-versa.

That's not a system that wants, needs, or should have RAID.

Who absolutely, positively should have RAID:

1) Photoshop. 2-3 drive RAID 0 is essential for a cache file.
2) Video editing / capturing. High definition video is obscenely bandwidth intensive. Again 2-3 drive RAID 0 mandatory, especially when we start editing 3-6 streams simultaneously.
3) Audio encoding. Most good audio encoders are I/O bound.
4) Pro audio. Got 20+ tracks of 24 bit 96 KHz audio open at once in your DAW? DSP effects on each one? The last thing you want to worry about is your I/O choking. You've got too many other damn problems to worry about, like audio latency, CPU utilization, etc...

There are a few other instances where RAID0 can make a huge impact, but I can't think of them off the top of my head

If you're primarily a gamer, or general desktop user, then RAID doesn't have any advantages for you.

VelociRaptor FTW

~MiSfit

 

[yours truly]

hi, quick question. ive only got an old PATA drive

would it be worth me buying a PCI SATA controller card, and a WD VelociRaptor

thanks

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: hopeless74
hi, quick question. ive only got an old PATA drive

would it be worth me buying a PCI SATA controller card, and a WD VelociRaptor

no, not in your case.

 

[yours truly]

ok thanks for the reply

any reason why? would my pci slot(i think its 32bit) bottleneck the performance?

thanks

 

[Blain]

it just wouldn't be "worth it" in your situation.
that's not saying there wouldn't be an improvement in performance.
but the price vs performance ratio just isn't there for you.

 

[yours truly]

thanks, i'll give it a miss then, maybe next year..

cheers

 

[0roo0roo]

mtron ssd

 

[angry hampster]

Originally posted by: themisfit610
Those benchmarks are retarded - unless all you really do is play games and copy files from a single drive to a RAID or vice-versa.

That's not a system that wants, needs, or should have RAID.

Who absolutely, positively should have RAID:

1) Photoshop. 2-3 drive RAID 0 is essential for a cache file.


~MiSfit

Seriously? I'm a professional photographer and the only images that have made my work computer (Mac G5 with 8GB RAM) stutter are 35-image photomerges from a 4x5 back, totally nearly 300megapixels. For the most part, the 2GB of RAM on my home desktop is more than plenty for photoshop with 16 bit TIFF files.