raid ata 100 a joke

[desktopsilver]

my tech guy at local c-store said raid pci ata 100 is a joke in the industry,,,,one thing 32 bit pci busses,,,i baught ata raid card and two ident drives (ibm 307030 dtla) tried to run stripped and it wouldnot do it so now i have them mirrored,,,with no benifits,,,,,before i buy two more drives to go mirrored stripped ,,,,,what do you guys think,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,i think im just going to go with a 15000 rpm scuzzy drive with a uw 160 adaptec controller card,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,i only play games and downoad from internet ocasionaly,,,

 

[Hender]

RAID is highly dependent on the drives that are used in the RAID setup, as well as the controller. Some controllers are better than other, some drives don't do RAID very well at all. Do some research to see if your drives work well under RAID setups. It's extremely likely, however, that with your usage, you WON'T see any benefit to RAID except for the guy who sells it to you getting more business.

If you just play a few games and download things occasionally, don't bother with SCSI. It's expensive, not up to full speed under Windows XP, and you'll be wasting your money. Stick with single drive IDE for such low requirements. Servers and high end workstations are the only places where SCSI fits.

 

[bignick]

in order to take advantage of ata 100 raid, you really need to have a 64 bit pci bus, and controller.

look at controllers by 3ware, and read reviews of them to get a better understanding of how the pci bus is limiting performance.

 

[ObiDon]

What line/model are your ibm 307030 dtla drives? I have a pair of 40GB 60GXPs running striped and they'll do 50MB+/s average.
I only use them for video capturing though. For downloading and gaming it would probably be overkill.
Perhaps a Western Digital SE drive would be good for you?

 

[mchammer187]

i have a pair of Westen Digital 1200JB's in Raid 0 Stripe size of 32K and they fly compared to my old maxtor 60GB non 740 DX

this is with a highpoint 370

i think it is worth it but of course SCSI raid will completely dominate it because not many hard drives touch 15K cheetahs to begin with

I'd say if you had 4x 1200JB's in RAID 0 it would be pretty fast though

 

[TheWart]

my WD 400BB 40GB raid-0 is plenty fast for me, MUCH better than same drives in regular mode.

 

[CAMS]

Originally posted by: desktopsilver
i only play games and downoad from internet ocasionaly,,,

Then you have no need for RAID, all that SCSI will do is load a game level a second or two faster. Save your money.

 

[Yobbo]

*drools* 8 SCSI 15k seagates RAID5 *drools*

 

[Daniel]

Yep its true, for your application it is pretty pointless, just get a nice ide drive with decent access times and you should be fine.

edit: so why couldn't you go striped on the raid card anyway... just wondering?

 

[PerfectFit]

Originally posted by: TheWart
my WD 400BB 40GB raid-0 is plenty fast for me, MUCH better than same drives in regular mode.

I am considering RAID 0 with dual WD40BB on a Promise FastTrak 100TX2 PCI card. Anybody have experience with this setup?

 

[Derango]

The Only raid I would ever do is one that mirrors the drives. You go into a RAID 0 and you now have 2x the chance of losing all the data on your hard drive If one drive dies, so does all your data...

But hey, thats just me

 

[aka1nas]

I would either go single drive or RAID 0 in your case. RAID 0 will give you a nice transfer rate boost when you need it, i.e. defragging, loading big game levels(morrowind actually loads twice as fast on my RAID array than it did before, there are actually a few current games that stress your I/O ATM). Also helps with multitasking, etc. What drive you use does matter, as well as what controller you have. SCSI is definately not worth it for you.