SAS vs Raptor

[nmaf]

i'm building my first brand-new pc, well, ever... i've only ever been able to afford random parts here and there, and now it's time to put this 7 year old rig to rest... Especially since this is my first ground-up new computer, cost isn't nearly as big an issue to me as it is to my fiance.

i am planning on getting an i7 920 with an asus p6t... now, as far as the HD is concerned, i've always wondered, why people would spend so much on a PC for performance, and then cheap out on the disk, which is the biggest performance bottleneck... so i had decided to go with a raptor... but now that i know the p6t has on-board SAS, i'm wondering if i would see any performance gains going that route... a 300gb raptor (i'm in canada) is $309... a 143gb cheetah is $329... i realize it's half the size, but i'm looking more at the fact it's only 20 bucks more... the HD space isn't a big issue, i'll have 2 x 1tb in mirror raid, and a 640gb ext drive as well, and my current windows drive is only 160gb, and hasn't come close to filling.

aside from the performance gains, i'm looking at SAS as an enterprise-quality drive that will probably last longer, and is less likely to experience .. death? or general crashing, as a consumer level hard drive would...

also, do i have to buy 2 sas drives, and use them in raid? anything i read about sas on the p6t says SAS raid, and i'm not sure if thats saying it offers raid, or requires it.

as far as what we'll be doing with the pc... She works a second job part time at home here doing photo editing in photoshop. we'll be buying a high def camcorder in the near future that we will edit videos on. i also, i dunno, might game a bit...

so, yeah... a 300gb raptor (150gb Vraptor is only like 50 bucks less for some reason), or a 150gb SAS drive? if i'm required to put the SAS in raid, i think $700 for a windows drive would be too cost prohibitive, and at that point, i'd probably rather buy an intel ssd anyways.

nathan

 

[Rubycon]

SAS is an interface that replaces parallel SCSI. That said if you're just planning on one or two drives SAS would be a waste. If you're using multiple drives on a mid end host then SAS starts to show the advantage even on the desktop.

Otherwise a single or pair of Velociraptors are fine.

 

[Andrew1990]

I am not the best when it comes to Hard Drives, but wouldnt 3-4 Western Digital 640GB Drives in Raid 0 or Raid 0+1 be faster than one raptor for the same price? Correct me if I am wrong though. You also get more HDD space and if you do 0+1 then you protect your data a little bit more than if it were on 1 drive.

 

[perdomot]

I have both hdds and the raptor is definately faster because of the low access time. I tried the 640 as a C drive but it felt less responsive than the raptor. I now use the raptor for my C drive and the 640 for storage. Works great.

 

[Se7eN S1N]

The raptor are great drives, but I think choosing between SAS and Sata would depend on what you plan on using the drives for, is it gaming ,rendering something very IO intensive or requires a lot of transfer. There's SAS drives that are 15k rpm and respond faster than the raptor and have more bandwidth. Cost is also a factor as they are a bit more pricey if you are looking for the most performance and reliability. Mirror two 15k RPM SAS drives and save a bit on space would be the way to go. Just my two cents

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: Se7eN S1N
The raptor are great drives, but I think choosing between SAS and Sata would depend on what you plan on using the drives for, is it gaming ,rendering something very IO intensive or requires a lot of transfer. There's SAS drives that are 15k rpm and respond faster than the raptor and have more bandwidth. Cost is also a factor as they are a bit more pricey if you are looking for the most performance and reliability. Mirror two 15k RPM SAS drives and save a bit on space would be the way to go. Just my two cents

I transplanted a 10 disk raptor 150 array to a 10 disk Fujitsu MBA147RC array (15K) and the performance difference was incredible!

 

[Se7eN S1N]

What Card are u using to run those 10 15k Drives, between the difference in bandwidth and 15k respond of 10 drives depending on what you are running should be noticeable differences.

Just out of curiosity tho what are you using the 10drive Sas Array ?

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: Se7eN S1N
What Card are u using to run those 10 15k Drives, between the difference in bandwidth and 15k respond of 10 drives depending on what you are running should be noticeable differences.

Just out of curiosity tho what are you using the 10drive Sas Array ?

The host is an Areca ARC1680ix-24 w/2GB DIMM and BBU. There are 10 Fujitsu MBA3147RC drives in RAID0 with 128KB stripe. It's used for NLE scratch data.

 

[HappyCracker]

The tagged command queueing on SAS is much more robust than the native command queueing on SATA and can better track a lot of outstanding I/O. If you're going to have a lot of outstanding I/O to your drives, the SAS should perform better overall. I work with large (>1500) drive Fibre Channel arrays with 800GB across 128 drives and .5TB of cache. So, I'm a bit biased and will always lean to enterprise class hardware. I've seen much better performance at work, even on the non-array/server stuff, and have been disappointed with consumer level hard drive performance when I get home. Comparing latency, a 15K spindle should have lower latency than a 10K spindle, but sequential transfer rates aren't really significantly different. The main argument for 15K drives is that you no longer need to short-stroke 10K spindles to get the edge performance. So, you'll get better overall drive performance on 15K drives than you would 10K drives.
That said, for your purposes, I'd stick with the consumer/high-performance SATA drives. It doesn't sound like you'll be pushing the I/O a SAS drive is capable of. Video work should be largely sequential, unless your drive is fragmented, and sequential I/O is pretty easy on drives. Photoshop is small stuff, really, and shouldn't tax the drives much. Save your money and enjoy the extra space.