Hard drive choices: SATA or EIDE w/ or w/o RAID?

[onesNzeros]

I'm starting to build a system and just stumbled across a deal at CompUSA where you can get a Seagate Barracuda 160GB drive for only 60 bucks after rebate, but of course it's UltraATA/100, not SATA which is what I was planning on getting this time around.

I use my computer for gaming, as a digital video recorder, and I do run linux part-time so compatibility with that matters, though I don't know if it is a factor at all here really. The system I'm planning to build would be an Athlon 64 3400+ w/ 1 GB RAM and onboard SATA RAID (the DFI Lanparty 250GB nForce3 board).

How much is SATA worth? Am I better off grabbing one or maybe two of these drives (for RAID 0) and forgetting SATA for now or should I stay with something like a 160-200 GB SATA drive?

 

[rforum]

For what its worth, I have a SATA RAID 0 setup with an auxiliary IDE drive for storage. When I run a benchmark on both the RAID gets much better scores. I have no idea whether or not you would get the same results on your system.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: rforum
For what its worth, I have a SATA RAID 0 setup with an auxiliary IDE drive for storage. When I run a benchmark on both the RAID gets much better scores. I have no idea whether or not you would get the same results on your system.

of course your striping raid will outperform a single drive, all drives being basically the same, but it doesn't have much to do with it being sata other than it is really easy to setup. the speed comes from striping the data across 2 hard drives. a striping raid will always have the faster transfer rates of large files vs a single drive if all the drives are the same type.

sata is not worth much if anything at this point unless you get the wd 74GB raptors, other than that the basic difference between a pata and sata drive is the connector. personally i see no reason to waste money on sata drives just for the connector, unless you want to drop a lot of coin and get a pair of wd 74GB raptors in striping raid. personally i wouldn't go raid unless it was for mirroring for data redundancy.

you really won't notice a difference except a slight speed up in load times of the games if you do a striping raid. no fps gain.

you also need to verify that your flavor of linux has all the drivers for the sata stuff if you go that route.

 

[onesNzeros]

For what its worth, I have a SATA RAID 0 setup with an auxiliary IDE drive for storage. When I run a benchmark on both the RAID gets much better scores. I have no idea whether or not you would get the same results on your system.

Well, I continued to hunt for info on the benefits of SATA and found a couple threads in different places that basically said there wasn't going to be any real noticable difference in speed between the two connections, at least until later generations of the drives came out (See second-to-last posting on pg. 2 at the link below).

I have the 120GB version of this drive currently and have been extremely happy with it so I decided to grab one of the 160 GBs since the SATA version was more than doube the price at NewEgg. Later on I do want to set up a couple SATA drives in a RAID configuration like you've got there (I sense the RAID is where the vast majority of the performance improvement you found is coming from) but for now I'll stick with the IDE drive with round cables for circulation sake and use the money as a cushion for the rest of the upgrade.

In case you or anyone else is curious, I found a fairly interesting thread discussing hard drives including SATA vs IDE at
http://forums.sudhian.com/mess...AR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear

Thanks for the quick response rforum. Btw, have you had any problems with data corruption with RAID 0 or has it been reliable for you?

EDIT: Looks like we were writing replies at the same time bob4322 but thanks for taking the time to respond. Why would you only use RAID for mirroring? Just the fact that two drives doubles the likelihood of a failure or is there more to it?

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: onesNzeros

For what its worth, I have a SATA RAID 0 setup with an auxiliary IDE drive for storage. When I run a benchmark on both the RAID gets much better scores. I have no idea whether or not you would get the same results on your system.

Well, I continued to hunt for info on the benefits of SATA and found a couple threads in different places that basically said there wasn't going to be any real noticable difference in speed between the two connections, at least until later generations of the drives came out (See second-to-last posting on pg. 2 at the link below).

I have the 120GB version of this drive currently and have been extremely happy with it so I decided to grab one of the 160 GBs since the SATA version was more than doube the price at NewEgg. Later on I do want to set up a couple SATA drives in a RAID configuration like you've got there (I sense the RAID is where the vast majority of the performance improvement you found is coming from) but for now I'll stick with the IDE drive with round cables for circulation sake and use the money as a cushion for the rest of the upgrade.

In case you or anyone else is curious, I found a fairly interesting thread discussing hard drives including SATA vs IDE at
http://forums.sudhian.com/mess...AR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear

Thanks for the quick response rforum. Btw, have you had any problems with data corruption with RAID 0 or has it been reliable for you?

EDIT: Looks like we were writing replies at the same time bob4322 but thanks for taking the time to respond. Why would you only use RAID for mirroring? Just the fact that two drives doubles the likelihood of a failure or is there more to it?

not much more to it than that. i run a 10k rpm u320 scsi system drive connected to a u160 scsi controller and a 80GB 7200rpm 8MB cache secondary drive. if i was going to invest in a ide raid setup i would do mirroring stricltly for redundancy, that is it. i have a couple of dead hdds sitting on my desk that remind me to backup as they experienced hardware failures. no way to get the data without paying mucho $$$$$. although it is a guarantee that a hdd will fail, the failure probably won't be for a couple of years, but usually at the worst time.

i have run computers with u320 15k rpm striping raids along with 7200rpm sata striping raids in them and although they are fast (the u320 setup would max out the pci bus, since it was a 32bit bus at ~125MB/s sustained), the price doesn't justify it to me. basically if i want balls out striping raid, i would go with scsi. my single scsi hdd has a sustained transfer rate of 60MB/s with quick access time. yes a ide striping raid will be faster for large files(i think around 80MB/s sustained), but it will still take longer for the hdd to find the data on the drive and you actually do notice it. if i wanted to go faster for my system drive i would just move upto a 15k rpm drive, which would give me a sustained transfer rate of 70-80MBMB/s, which is not much slower than a striped 7200rpm ide raid.

i guess it is just a personal preference as the way i set my computers up - usually a 10krpm u160/u320 18-36GB scsi system drive and then a large ide secondary drive. personally i don't need any more disk speed as my setup works well but if i did go with a raid i would rather have the piece of mind that i have a built in backup than a speed performance that you will notice while benchmarking but may not in real world use. for your uses, you don't need the speed of a striping raid and if you have 2x120GB drives in a striping raid, that means you will have ~240GB of total disk space, but if one of the drives fail, you are screwed unless you have an excellent backup system. data corruption shouldn't really be an issue, again as long as both drives are working well.

also, remember that if a regular ide drive has a serious software failure, there are programs that will allow you to recover the data pretty quick, i have done this in the past, but with a striped raid, only portions of data get sent to each drive so data recovery becomes a serious problem if not impossible.

my current backup system is with ghost over a network, but i am getting tired of that and may pick up a pair of cheap ata100 120GB drives and do a mirroring raid on them, better to be prepared for the worst.

 

[onesNzeros]

Hmm, I guess I'll have to see what options are out there when the time comes to upgrade. Ideally I'd probably have three hard drives with striping on two and the third for parity but I guess there's some overhead involved in creating the parity bits based on a couple sites I was just looking at so making a setup like that fast enough to justify the cost may or may not be worthwhile.

I've had two Westerd Digital drives, a Quantum Fireball, and my current Seagate and none have failed on me. Actually there were two computers/hard drives before that but neither failed during the computer's useful life either, so I guess I can count myself lucky because I know a lot of people have had drives give out on them. (That reminds me though, I should really set up my old Optiplex for backups.) With files backed up the loss of the data on the hard drives in RAID 0 wouldn't be a big concern to me but I'll have to find out about the speed difference for large and small file handling when it comes time to upgrade.

 

[rforum]

onesNzeros: to answer your question, no I have not had any corruption problems wtih my RAID 0 configuration. I'm using the RAID built into my MSI nVidia nForce 3 250 motherboard. Of couse software is included and setup with Windows XP was easy. Since RAID 0 provides no redundancy I routinely backup my data files to my storage IDE drive and also periodically make ghost backups for protection. I don't find this process at all cumbersome and it works well for me as opposed to mirroring which is transparent but your buying an extra hard disk just for backup purposes and halving the amount of storage space potentially available. I guess its just a matter of personal preference and, of course, the amount of money you have to spend.