Storage subsystem has aged - Should I just get a New HDD?

[imported_millerduck]

OK, so I have an old Nforce 4 system that I am replacing the MB, CPU and RAM up to a P6T, i7 920 & OCZ DDR3-1600.

I blew my entire budget on those 3 components so no SSD for me yet. I will likely grab a Vertex or Intel drive for x-mas to coincide with Win 7 release.

That being said, I want to know if there is still a performance benefit to using the RAID 0 on my 80GB drives versus getting a newer single SATA drive for the OS. Capacity is not of great concern as I also have a 7200.9 300GB drive for storage.

Thoughts?

MD

 

[Shmee]

what are the model numbers on the 80 GB drives? it really depends on the model. a single WD caviar black might be faster, especially if the drives are older. probably a better option would be with a single high performance larger drive, like the caviar black or samsung spinpoint F1. Of course, a Raid0 of these drives would provide even better performance.

I would say just get a fast cheap single drive. you say capacity is not a concern, you may as well get a 750 or larger, they are much cheaper now.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...n=caviar+black&x=0&y=0
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16822152102

 

[imported_millerduck]

The 80s are Seagate 7200.7 which I just checked and they are SATA 1.5G so it sounds like a new faster drive may be a good choice.

Thanks,
MD

 

[faxon]

i just benchmarked my 120gb 7200.7 drive, and it was pretty horrible. something like 40mb/s peak sequential read averaging off at like 25mb/s. and the random writes measured in IOMeter were horrible, not even worth mentioning. i was pulling some 30gb of data i had left on it (mostly old pictures) to sort through before recycling the drive since i dont have any systems running IDE drives anymore and the drive was approaching 7 years of on time. a new 5200RPM drive would have better seek times, random read/writes, and sequential IO speeds by a factor of between 2 and 4 times. if you're looking for a fast drive on a budget the WD Caviar Black series has a 500gb model for only $69 on the egg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16822136320. alternatively, a spinpoint F1 from samsung would probably perform similarly. seagate has been having major reliability issues as of late even with their non bricked firmware drives. at fry's in palo alto we have 2 dozen 1TB barracudas on the shelf, all with good firmware revisions, all returned because customers were unsatisfied with them for some reason or another. i saw one guy come in and return 6 just today from a batch of 20 he got saying that they were all DOA (they were). My step dad also has 5 of the 1TB ES.2s, one of which is full of bad sectors and in need of RMA, and of the other 4 in our raid server, 2 keep reporting SMART errors and the other one has a bad firmware revision. the only good one is the one that we replaced when the one with bad sectors went out on us 2 days after we installed it. the 4 400GB 7200.10 drives we had in there originally are all fine though, but they were also made back before seagate started having so many problems. once we get everything sorted out though, we will probably have enough spare ES.2 drives lying around for me to set up my own file server on the cheap :laugh: