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Poll: (4) HD IDE RAID ---or--- x15 Cheetah?

B

BowDown

Banned
What would be faster (I think I know the real answer, but I want to hear from you) in real world performance:

-(4) HD IDE RAID0 Running 7200RPM HD's

or

-(1) x15 Seagate Cheetah U160 HD

Vote in the poll, and post here.

I figure I don't really need the space, and instead of upgrading my (2) HD Raid to 4, why not get an x15 Cheetah 🙂.
 
i don't which would be faster, but i'd choose the x15 over raid. Oh wait. I did. 🙂
 
The two aren't comparable IMO.

I wouldn't recommend ANY stripe with more than two disks without resorting to RAID 5. This is far overkill for ANY workstation! Ram is cheap load up with 1024 MB and get it over with. 🙂

Going SCSI has plenty of advantages. Depending on the card you choose, your upgrade paths are VERY flexible. You can add scanners, tape devices, external hard disks, cd rom and recorders, dvd, etc.

I've tried 4 disk stripes with ATA RAID and it's more trouble than it's worth. Once you have two disks, the performance of adding more isn't worth the additional investment. If you MUST have it, be sure to use IBM drives as these seem to work best with stripes where you have two devices on one cable.

Yes, that IBM disk is going to rule! That's 75GXP technology (glass platters!) folks! That thing's gonna scream! Just remember that people with glass hard drives can't throw stones! 😀

Cheers!
 
Im sure theres no Doubt the -(1) x15 Seagate Cheetah U160 HD would be faster overall but Geez you sure do pay the price for that speed also.
 
Well now it's time to hunt for a good deal on a Cheetah 🙂. Anyone heard anything bad about SCSI DVD Drives? Maybe I should upgrade my whole setup to SCSI (again 🙂).
 
The X15 would own the IDE RAID0...

CPU usage of IDE RAID ignored for the moment....in regular use Seek time is more important than transfer rate, and IDE RAID0 doesn't help seek time. The Cheetah x15 has the fastest seek times there are period.

Benchmarks are someone invalid, they frequently have to much emphasis on transfer rate, which really doesn't matter much....unless you are running a Fileserver, or an A/V editting workstation transfer rate is a useless statistic next to seek times.

The x15 would dominate the IDE RAID0.

You would make it a 16-way stripe and still the x15 would be better.
 
x15 - raid 0 configs suck imo... i tried one with scsi seagate barracuda 18xl's and you get crazy throughput but everything else is just plain SLOW. the raid configuration got higher benchmarks but the actual benchmark took about 3-4 times longer to do. my single quantum fireball LM was faster, my atlas 10k II kills it. i guess raid0 would be useful for... writing huge files? like video editing? i dunno.
 
I wouldn't say that the Cheetah will kick the RAID setup outa here, the RAID setup would still be plenty quick (transfer rates would be much higher then a Cheetah), though it loses (still) in Access times by ALOT. almost a factor of 2 if not more..

if you set up those IDE drives properly, you could load levels in Quake 3, UT etc extremely quick, but back to reality, windows programs aren't made of one file, but rather multiple files.

which is one reason why the Cheetah X15 is a better drive then 4 drives running IDE RAID. the speed difference would be tough to actually feel, though I would say that the system would be a bit more quick when you tell it to do something, however if it was something that takes long enough to do on either systems (probably a nice 10 gig file?), IDE RAID would start looking good.

one other advantage though of going SCSI right now, is that you can add a whole bunch more stuff without having to buy a new controller card. want a new optical drive? well now that you have your SCSI card, might as well get a SCSI drive to go with it!

my Vote goes with the Cheetah. less heat and space taken up then 4 IDE RAID drives.. yikes..
 
It depends on what your doing. From someone that has done both here's my opinion. I used the IBM 75gxp's in a raid 0. I did alot of research on the Seagate X15 and decided from what I read that it was much faster. $650 later I had the scsi setup.
And here's my opinion-
1) The scsi set up took forever to boot up, which may not be a big deal to some. But having to reboot after everything you do, loading programs etc., this gets annoying. (Raid took 7seconds, scsi 25+)
2) The scsi set up was annoyingly loud. So much my wife complained. It drove me nuts when trying to work.
3) I use my computer for games and photo work. I timed loading games and graphic files with both the raid and the scsi. There isn't much difference. Sure the x15 has low seek times, but even when you load up big games like Q3 and BGII the difference comes down to 1 second. The raid loaded graphic files much, much faster.
4) Now the last piece that makes the x15 really slow. Because it was only 18g, I ran out of space. So to play a new game I would have to delete something and then load the new one. This takes alot longer than any load time of a raid array. On the raid I can have every game I own, photo, MP3, etc. with room to spare.
So I sold the x15 and I'm back to raid. It was an expensive test.
With the same amount of money as a scsi card and an x15 I got a T-bird at 1.4Ghz, Asus A7V133, and a Herc Geforce 2 GTS Pro. This is alot more fun than 1 hd.
 
The scsi set up took forever to boot up, which may not be a big deal to some. But having to reboot after everything you do, loading programs etc., this gets annoying. (Raid took 7seconds, scsi 25+)

there's something wrong with that... my computer takes maybe about 25 -40 seconds to load, and I'm on an ancient 4 gig HD..

did you have a network card in that computer? that slows things down ALOT..

I use my computer for games and photo work. I timed loading games and graphic files with both the raid and the scsi. There isn't much difference. Sure the x15 has low seek times, but even when you load up big games like Q3 and BGII the difference comes down to 1 second. The raid loaded graphic files much, much faster.

I expected as much, RAID is only good for higher transfer rates, so graphics and anything with long sequential transfer rates is going to give RAID the advantage.

when loading games, you have multiple files (normally), but when running RAID IDE arrays, the difference in transfer rates helps to make up some of the access time difference.

the question then is, if they are equal (or very close to equal), what else will make me want SCSI, or IDE RAID?

I know what I'd choose.
 
I would say the Cheetah.
One 75gxp goes down, so does all your data.
I learned that the hard way last Sunday (Quantum KA went down 🙁)
 
a 4 hard drive raid using maxtor DM+ would have a theoretical sustained transfer rate of 164 mb/sec. the seagate x15 has a 38 mb/sec transfer rate. But a 9.0 access time versus a 4.3 access time is substantial. It depends on what you do. For the things that I do. I would need the RAID b/c I do divx audio.
 
There's definitely something wrong if your SCSI setup is taking an additional 25 seconds to boot. I have 2 HD's and a cdrom drive hooked up to my SCSI card it the initialization process took less time than the onboard RAID controller on my ABIT. If you're not willing to take the time to optimize your setup and make sure your configuration is properly set up before you got rid of it, you never should have bought it in the first place.

"2) The scsi set up was annoyingly loud. So much my wife complained. It drove me nuts when trying to work."

The noise bothers some people, not others, this is a personal thing not a black and white issue.

"3) I use my computer for games and photo work. I timed loading games and graphic files with both the raid and the scsi. There isn't much difference. Sure the x15 has low seek times, but even when you load up big games like Q3 and BGII the difference comes down to 1 second. The raid loaded graphic files much, much faster."

You bought an X15 to play games and do graphics work? Wow, it's a real shocker you didn't notice a huge performance improvement in those ideally suited environments. Large file manipulation is what RAID is designed for. If you're doing serious graphic or A/V work, IDE RAID is what you should be using if you can't afford SCSI RAID.

"Because it was only 18g, I ran out of space"

I assume you knew you were buying an 18GB drive. I don't see how this is any sort of valid arguement as you should have had an idea going in how much space you were going to need. In your situation and usage patterns, IDE RAID is the better option. For others, that may be the case.

I don't really see what BowDown is trying to accomplish. If you don't need any more space, why the new hard drives? If all you're doing is looking for some to mess around with, a SCSI card and X15 is an expensive route to achieve this. If all you want is bragging rights, then go ahead. But if you are looking to get the highest performance available, I would wait for the X15 II which will be released in a few months and should set the standard for about another year.
 


<< I don't really see what BowDown is trying to accomplish. If you don't need any more space, why the new hard drives? If all you're doing is looking for some to mess around with, a SCSI card and X15 is an expensive route to achieve this. If all you want is bragging rights, then go ahead. But if you are looking to get the highest performance available, I would wait for the X15 II which will be released in a few months and should set the standard for about another year. >>



Well I've tried every combo over the last 4 years or so... Here's some of the setups I've run:

Single WDC (crap)
Single IBM 14.4gig 7200 (eh)
Single Ultra SCSI Cheetah (eh)
Single Maxtor 20gig DM+ (not bad...)
(6) 4.3gig 7200RPM Barracuda's w/Adaptec 133U2 SCSI RAID w/32MB Cache (nice, but access time sucked, and it was 6-drives with a $350 controller)
(2) Maxtor 20gig HD's RAID0 (not bad...)
(1) 40gig Maxtor DM+ (quick, still ok)
(2) Quantum LM RAID0 (not bad, CPU% sucks)

I'm looking for something that will wow me... I mean if someone gets on my machine and loads quake3 or another huge app, I want them to say &quot;wow, that frick'in loaded quick!.&quot; RAID gave me some bragging rights, but in all actuality I don't see much of a performance boast with it...

SCSI maybe be the way to go...
 
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