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Fastest hard drive?

T

ta8689

Golden Member
Once I get enough money, i am going to buy some hard drives. I want 10k rpm sata... the 74 gig raptors. I dont need 300 gb, so im not going with their 150s.. I will run raid-0, and tiger is having a sale http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications...tem-details.asp?EdpNo=716995&CatId=139
$240 after rebate for (2) 74 gig raptors. Anything i should know? Ive never run raid before, how exactly do you do it? I know how it works, but the installation procedure....
 
Do a Google search on RAID you will find much about it. As for setting it up, read your motherboard manual.

Advice, RAID 0 offers no performance in day-to-day operations. The only way RAID 0 will benefit you is if you do large file transfers/video encoding or video streaming.

Other than that, in a RAID 0 environment, you run the risk of losing it all if one drive fails. Your PC will not work faster, you games MAY load 1 second faster than others not running RAID but once in the game--it will not benefit you.
 
What you should know is that a single 150GB Raptor will be faster than two 74GB ones in a RAID 0 for most things.
 
What I dont like about RAID is the concept that with Striping with you spread the data across 2 drives for faster reads and writes, you have twice the liklihood of a drive failure, because you are using 2 drives. If either drive fails everything is gone.
 
Quite honestly i dont care if it fails. I have a backup copy on another drive. Ill just RMA the thing if it does. And why would one raptor 150 be faster than 2 74s? you read/write twice as fast. Windows would load faster too wouldnt it? On some reviews of the 150, people have said that they lost performance by switching from the 74s to the 150 and that they cant wait to get another one to get back to raid.
 
If you read the review @ Storagereview, you'd find that the 150GB Raptor is better than the 74's. Doesn't matter if you don't need the space...single drive performance, the 150 beats the hell out of the 74GB. Stripe the 74's, and you get a marginal increase.
 
I'm pretty sure that 2 74gb raptors will be faster than 1 150gb. As for the RAID question, it's pretty straight forward, and self explainatory. Just go into your motherboards RAID setup, and you should see an option to create a striped RAID. Select that, and then use the two Raptors. As for stripe size, it depends on what your doing. For a main OS/game drive, I'd use a smaller size. Its been a while since I've set up RAID as well, so I don't remember the sizes available for use, but I do know that smaller = better for loading programs, games, OS, etc. and larger size is better for larger files like video editing.
 
What's most important here is that striping drives, in a real world environment, shows very little difference. You're fooling yourself if you think it's going to be visibly faster (I have no less than 15 stripe sets, trust me on this). If you don't believe me, check multiple reviews on raids vs single drive.

The ONLY time you see a difference is sustained data transfer.
 
Twice as fast?! Yeah right. A 150GB Raptor (denser platter, newer drive) is going to be faster than 2 RAID 0'd 74GB drives. What's the point in having such a fast drive though? The 150GB Raptor costs about 4x more per GB than the 400GB WD4000KD. You're wasting so much money just to save a couple seconds in loading time.
 
Originally posted by: ta8689
Windows would load faster too wouldnt it?
Click to expand...

Whoopie dooooo. "My Windows loads 10 seconds faster than yours!!!" Low ePenis characteristic if you ask me.

Please read everyone's advice carefully before you make the jump to RAID. Yeah if you have a backup on another drive you are fairly safe, but I have seen very few OS backup programs that actually work flawlessly when restoring to a RAID 0 setup.

 
No, 2x74 raptors is slower for most tasks than 1 raptor 150. If you don't understand why this is then you need to read up on how hard drive technology works. If you don't have the time to read up on it then you'll just have to read the review, and if you can't be bothered to do that then take our word for it.

It would be slower to use 2x raptor 74s for most roles, you would get a slight increase in large file transfers, but in testing this doesn't make a difference for loading maps etc in games.
 
Originally posted by: Bobthelost
No, 2x74 raptors is slower for most tasks than 1 raptor 150. If you don't understand why this is then you need to read up on how hard drive technology works. If you don't have the time to read up on it then you'll just have to read the review, and if you can't be bothered to do that then take our word for it.

It would be slower to use 2x raptor 74s for most roles, you would get a slight increase in large file transfers, but in testing this doesn't make a difference for loading maps etc in games.
Click to expand...

yes, if you deal with large file transfer, RAID0 can help a lot
 
As I said, sustained data transfers. However, you'd have to do this fairly frequently to see any time saving benefit to it.
 
Windows wil NOT load faster by any decent margin.
Games will NOT load faster by a decent margin.
11gb uncompressed AVIs will be read faster.

Why? Seeking. In raid0, 2 drives have ot find data on disparate parts of different discs. Increases seek time. In programs with many small files, performance actually suffers. In programs with a decent amouint of medium files, performance reci8eves little to no boost. If you copy from 1 drive to another 100gb files all day, performamnce will increase.

Remember, for daily use, 2 drives also means 2x as many fragmented files, thus increasing seeks even more unless you defrag a lot.
 
I'd love to have 4 Raptor 150's on a RAID 0+1 =]
But that's besides the point. If you got the money go with 1 150. There is just no point to get 2 74GB because 1 150 is about the same if not even better. In the future you can even get 2 150, I say this path will be slightly better.
 
go to the storagereview review of the 150.

in VERY short:

1. new technology = faster technology
2. 16mb cache > 8mb cache
3. higher the platter density the better
4. general consensus on a tech forum = listen to advice

i know i'm missing a couple other things but basically yea
 
Originally posted by: ta8689
Alrite, ill believe you guys on the fact that the new raptors are faster for average usage, but could you explain it to me? This is after all a tech forum..
Click to expand...

You're getting some conflicting messages here.

Two Raptor 74GB drives in RAID0 are going to be awfully fast. The Raptor 150 is faster than a single Raptor 74GB (look at StorageReview's numbers; they actually know how to test drives), but a RAID0 will do better with any kind of disk-level multitasking or when STR matters (not that often in desktop situations, but it can help sometimes). Seek time will be almost identical between them (the 74GB raptors are actually a hair faster in seek time than the 150GB version).

SR results -- single drives, includes Raptor 150 and Raptor 74

If you're just gaming, I would think you would be better with a single 150GB Raptor than two 74GB ones in RAID0. RAID0 generally does very little for load times in games, since they tend to read in lots of separate little pieces of data from different files, and there is a fair amount of CPU limitation as well.

EDIT:
Well if you take a look at the mid-later pages of this review, the raptor 74's in raid 0 are ALWAYS better than the one 150....
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=raptor150raid&page=1

Help....
Click to expand...

Most of the tests they ran are synthetic ones that depend largely on high STR. I would not consider this very representative of how the drives will run in more or less 'normal' desktop usage.
 
Originally posted by: Bobthelost
Game PC couldn't find thier arses with both hands, map, GPS and the entire Ordinance survey organisation in assitance.
Click to expand...

lol truth.
 
I'm personally waiting for the single platter 74, bascially the 150's brother for lower noise and same performance at a cheaper price.
 
Originally posted by: Zebo
I'm personally waiting for the single platter 74, bascially the 150's brother for lower noise and same performance at a cheaper price.
Click to expand...

When is that coming out? The 150 is a little pricey for my budget.
 
Money when aquired could be wisely spent elsewhere in a System (depending desires) then some RAID config for a home PC...
 
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