Question about hard drive speeds and performance...

[Futher]

I'm thinking of upgrading my system in about 6 months. I doubt hard drive technology will change THAT much other than size until then. I currently have 3 drives; (1) 100 gig 7200, and (2) 120 gig 7200 drives. Will Raid or SATA hard drives, or even scsi, give me a large speed increase over these drives? I don't mean speed as in transferring between the two, in general computing speed. Thanks

 

[AndyHui]

No.

You may want to look at 10K RPM drives, but apart from that, you won't see anything major in terms of performance increases.

 

[Matthias99]

The other thing that *does* impact general HD performance is cache size. Crappy standard drives nowadays have 2MB -- the fast ones (such as the Western Digital "Special Edition" drives) have 8MB. The difference between a 7200RPM 2MB and a 7200RPM 8MB drive is noticeable.

RAID 0 (fast, but decreased reliability), 1 (halves your disk space), or 5 (best, but takes 4 equal-sized disks and eats up 1/4 of the available space) can give a sizable performance boost, mostly for read-heavy things like games (it also drops load and boot times a *lot*).

Going up to SATA or SCSI, unless you're also going to 10KRPM, is unlikely to do much for you other than emptying your wallet much faster.

 

[helpme]

5 (best, but takes 4 equal-sized disks and eats up 1/4 of the available space) can give a sizable performance boost, mostly for read-heavy things like games (it also drops load and boot times a *lot*).

I believe raid 5 was slower than 0 or 1 or 0+1 due to the parity calculations, even if it's hardware based raid-5. Reads were semi fast, but writes were much slower.

 

[allthismoney]

nadda, unless you time every single process or execution on your machine.

 

[Regs]

Win XP will boot faster , Other than that, Access times may increase upwards to 10%. Making it un noticeable in most applications. Transfer speed is the only huge increase.

 

[dpain]

RAID 0 does not decrease reliability. Where did you read that? It stripes the data across disks for performance. If you lose a drive, then yes you will lose all your data. But if you lose your drive in single hard drive, you will still lose your data.

dpain

 

[Sideswipe001]

Originally posted by: dpain
RAID 0 does not decrease reliability. Where did you read that? It stripes the data across disks for performance. If you lose a drive, then yes you will lose all your data. But if you lose your drive in single hard drive, you will still lose your data.

dpain

Yeah, but if there's 2 parts that could fail, the chaces are more likely that one of them will.

That being said, I've not ever lost data using my RAID 0, and never had a HD fail using it - but it's possible, and I think the increased speed is well worth that risk.

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: dpain
RAID 0 does not decrease reliability. Where did you read that? It stripes the data across disks for performance. If you lose a drive, then yes you will lose all your data. But if you lose your drive in single hard drive, you will still lose your data.

dpain

Raid 0 stripping does not, but Raid 1 mirroring does offer more data integrity having the same data on two drives.