Raid 0 Striping....Performace........

[BlackDragon8303]

Alright guys I know the answer to this one but what will be faster?
1 30 gig IBM Deskstar 75GXP @ ATA 100 or.....
2 15 gig IBM Deskstar 75GXP's ATA 100 running at IDE 0 Striping (Not mirroring)?

Quick reply guys if you could.....if you could show me some actual benchmarks to prove my theory that would be great too....BTW going on the Abit KT7 mobo (I believe that uses the adaptec IDE raid caird built in also doesnt it?)

 

[Sephiroth_IX]

Black - You will cut boot times in half. I read that on test machines it went from 31 normal to 16 raid. All the way across the board, you will have better hard drive performance, and hopefully none of that annoying harddrive access slumber.

It doesnt use the adaptec, the ata/100 controller also does raid.

 

[stuman74]

I have two 15 GB Deskstars on my KT7-RAID. Seems pretty fast, but I don't have any benchmarks. I just worry sometimes about backing all of it up when I upgrade from that mobo someday. Seems like it would be a huge pain is the a$$.

 

[Fumiup]

The KT-7 uses the Highpoint 370 controller

Highpoint-Tech

I currently use 2 IBM 15gb 75gxp in raid 0

HD-Tach average is around 68000
Sandra score is around 41500

If you do decide to go raid check out the KT7FAQ

http://go.to/kt7faq

Do like they suggest and use 16k clusters and `format C: /Z:32`

 

[soulm4tter]

I saw some benchmarks in MaximumPC. They compared those drives with a Promise ATA/100 RAID controller. Sustained read speeds were 28mb/s for single, 38mb/s for raid. read burst speeds were 60 for single 83 for raid. they also had time to copy 644mb, which was much faster for raid array, although i can't remember the numbers. They benchmarked another controller that was really crappy. I can't remember the controller card, but performance actually decreased in some benchmarks.

 

[stuman74]

I downloaded and ran the free version of that HD Tach 2.61. My results were:

Read Speed Average: 62214.6 kps

Is this good?

 

[Double Trouble]

The answer to your question depends on what you're planning to do. Contrary to popular belief, for most 'normal' stuff, a striped raid system will not increase performance. If you play games, surf the net etc etc, it will not make a big difference and is not worth the price or increased risk of hard drive failure.

If, however, you do a lot of transferring of large sequential files, (for example, video editing, or working with large databases etc), then it's definitely worth it, go with the two smaller drives in a striped configuration.

 

[xtreme2k]

get the raid if you feel comfitable with configuring computers and feel that it is ok for a slightly higher chance of failure

personally, get the raid

- it is not difficult to configure, all done in BIOS
- even though chance of failure is higher than a single drive, the chance is STILL VERY LOW
- CPU utilisation is slightly higher but it is still within an acceptable range
- dont expect a huge speed up in program loading time, but will definately feel the speed of a disk intensive operation