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adun79

Junior Member
Nov 16, 2006
8
0
0
Hi everybody

Can someone please tell me what kind of performance increase should I expect by using 2 discs in RAID 0?
I was thinking about buying a WD2500KS SE16 (no raid) or 2 WD2500YS RE (for raid 0, in case there's a visible speed increase). Do you guys know other drives in the same price category that would be better performing/quiter/reliable?

Thanks
 

Fallen Kell

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
6,106
467
126
Personally I have had lots of bad luck with WD disks. I am giving them another chance in my new system with a Raptor (but that is the only disk they have a 5 year warrenty for so I guess if it was a bad product they would lose a lot of money on replacements).

Anyway, I usually won't buy a disk anymore unless it has 5 years warrenty. So it has been mostly Seagates for me lately.

As for RAID performance, well it will depend on your RAID controller. As shown in the reviews on anandtech, most RAID controllers built into motherboards are really not all that great and will not give you a big performance boost in my opinion. If you really want RAID for performance, you need to look at getting a quality PCI-E RAID controller card.
 

Zepper

Elite Member
May 1, 2001
18,998
0
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Read my review of the Hitachi 7K80 drive here: http://www.techimo.com/reviews/ . Then follow the links inside the review to some tests of pairs of them and even quads. The do pretty good on synthetic benchmarks and even get more performance than average on real-world apps. But I suppose a pair of the new Seagate 7200.10 (perpendicular recording) drives would do even better until the other guys finally go perp on the desktop drives.

.bh.
 

imaheadcase

Diamond Member
May 9, 2005
3,850
7
76
From what I read on other forums 2x seagate 7200.10 drives make great for raid 0. I saw someone with raid 0 on the motherboard from Gigabyte DS3 getting around 260meg burst speeds. Im not familiar with raid cards performance over that, but that seems like a nice increase itself over non-raid setup. I think on mine old IBM IDE 100 i get around 60ish burst speed not raided. So RAID will help nicely on game loads/big files i assume :)