RAID0 or Raptor?

L

leetkyle

New Member
Okay!

I've filled up my 74GB Raptor and I think its time to upgrade. I use a lot of space so I need a lot of space! I've been looking around and apparently, getting 2 7200RPM drives and RAID0'ing them will smoke any Raptor. Currently, I am looking at getting:

2 x 320GB Seagate 7200.10RPM 16MB Cache SATA-2 Drives in RAID 0

Here are the pros and cons of getting them:

+ Over 600GB Space after Windows Installation
+ Faster than a Raptor, and over 8x the space
+ Techgage rated 10/10 editor's choice for the drive as mentioned above
- If one drive fails, it's all failed
- I've never RAIDed before (Asus P5W DH Deluxe, does allow RAID0)

I appreciate any input, thanks!

> It would cost me less to buy 2 of those drives and RAID0 and sell my Raptor than to buy a new Raptor.
 
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I would go with the RAID 0, because you do get alot more storage, cheaper then a 150GB Raptor, and sometimes performs better.

As for drives failing, it's rare, and highly unlikely that it would happen anytime soon.
 
The increase will not be noticeable unless you do a lot of hard drive intensive programs, it also provides your HD twice the chance of failure without twice the performance. However, like OMEGA said HD failure isn't that common, but when 1 fails in RAID 0 (also known as disk stripping) all information is lost. Just another side of the story. Good Luck either way.
 
You will notice an improvement mainly only during loading times, and hard drive intensive apps.
 
It's actually 596GB before installing windows but it's still a ton of space.

What do you do that requires RAID0 for performance boosting? Load times wont get that much better with recent games. When it takes a minute to load a level, RAID0 will knock that down maybe 10 seconds. IMO RAID0 is not worth it, yes it's faster but that speed is mostly on paper (ie benchmarks like PCMark)
 
I have two WD 250gb drives in RAID 0. I haven't really noticed any speed advantages (then again, I haven't been looking too hard), but I'd say go for it. It's a lot more storage than a raptor for a fraction of the price.
 
simply saying "a RAID array will outperform a raptor" is too vague

i've got one 80gb hard drive at my house that only has a transfer rate of ~19MB/s, an older 1st gen SATA hard drive that runs ~50MB/s, and a newer SATAII 500GB hard drive that runs at ~60-70MB/s, ALL 3 of which are 7200rpm drives........

Also keep in mind that the raptor's higher rotational speed speeds up seek time AS WELL AS max. read speed, where a RAID array makes no improvement to the drives' seek times.

And also, you can RAID more than 2 drives, so even if it's true that a RAID can be far faster than a RAPTOR, it's definitely a variable statement.

and as far as reliability concerns, i don't understand what you people keep on your hard drives that is so important that you can't risk a raid array crashing.......

keep your documents, etc. on a flash drive, a small unraided hard drive, or do what i do and just e-mail them to yourself.

i can't think of a single thing that's too large to fit onto a 1g flash drive, or into online storage that you couldn't replace if your hard drive died. And there's video editing/music editing/servers running 16 or more drives in RAID0, or if you want to be safe, you could run raid1+0 and be even more safe than running a single drive.
 
When comparing two 320GB SATA 3.0Gb/s hard drives with 16MB of cache each to a 10K SATA Raptor, the RAID array will most likely get higher transfer rates, but it wont have any faster read/access times.
 
Cromewell said:
It's actually 596GB before installing windows but it's still a ton of space.

What do you do that requires RAID0 for performance boosting? Load times wont get that much better with recent games. When it takes a minute to load a level, RAID0 will knock that down maybe 10 seconds. IMO RAID0 is not worth it, yes it's faster but that speed is mostly on paper (ie benchmarks like PCMark)
Click to expand...

This is very true, and RAIDs have their advantages when you are working with things that really tax your hard drive. Examples are 3D rendering, Audio Rendering, anything to do with Film like editing massive amounts of data, modifying huge databases, running databases, etc.

Actually it has been proven benchmark wise that one raptor by itself will beat two regular SATA drives in RAID 0. A high end raptor drive has an access time of 4ms (i think) which is pretty darn fast. On top of that its seek time is faster and it spins at a higher rate.

RAID 0 is really pointless for an end user and does not improve gaming performance. Even though it is not that common for drives to fail these days, software corruption is somewhat common. If you get any sort of file system problem or software problem on either drive you are pretty much screwed. In fact the best way to run RAID 0 is really RAID 0 + 1 which would cost you double the money because you need 4 drives to accomplish this.

I set up a RAID 0 for a friend of mine that does video production on the side. He films, loads video, edits it, post edits it, adds effects and masters the audio. His RAID crashed after a year or so (he had back ups though, because I set him up with like 5 external hard drives for back ups) and he went ahead and wiped and reloaded windows himself this time but didn't know how to set up the RAID so he skipped it. He later told me he doesn't even really notice a huge difference only at times was the RAID 0 faster. He would be working with files that were 5 or 6 gigs at a time, and then when you add multiple tracks of audio it gets even bigger. So, really don't bother setting up RAID 0 because it will most likely not even benefit you.

If you don't believe me read this

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101
 
leetkyle said:
Okay!
2 x 320GB Seagate 7200.10RPM 16MB Cache SATA-2 Drives in RAID 0

Here are the pros and cons of getting them:

+ Over 600GB Space after Windows Installation
Click to expand...

Just so you know, when you raid 0 , you don't combine the storage of both hard drives, so with 2x320G in raid 0, it'll have the same space as just one 320G.
 
Reneki said:
Just so you know, when you raid 0 , you don't combine the storage of both hard drives, so with 2x320G in raid 0, it'll have the same space as just one 320G.
Click to expand...
Yes you actually do, RAID0 combines multiple drives so it appears as one larger drive. I have RAID0 setup for my two 320GB and it gives you 640GB of storage.

You're probably thinking about RAID1
 
you have to personally tried them to see the difference in performance. :)

36gb x2, 74x2, 150x2 tried them all. you have no idea how fast it installed vista and install pc games and huge files. games load faster too. i jumped back and forth between these and those 500gb sataII 7200.10
 
kof2000 said:
you have to personally tried them to see the difference in performance. :)

36gb x2, 74x2, 150x2 tried them all. you have no idea how fast it installed vista and install pc games and huge files. games load faster too. i jumped back and forth between these and those 500gb sataII 7200.10
Click to expand...

yes I have seen it make boots times incredibly fast, but its not going to improve gaming performance at all, and it puts you at a higher risk of data loss.

Its not going to load MS office or a video game that much faster because those load times don't even really stress the HD enough as is. RAID 0 does not make the read/write times of you optical drives faster, so it won't install software or even really install an OS that much faster. Especially if you are running ATA/33 optical drives like most computers already are.

However, I am done and everyone knows my advice so take it or leave it.
 
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kof2000 said:
installed vista in 10 minutes, boots to desktop in 15 seconds.

here are some benchmarks raid and single drives

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/06/wd1500ad_raptor_xtends_performance_lead/

or if you have the money for it can try one of the SOLID STATE DRIVES.
Click to expand...

That article proves my point, one high end drive beats out two regular drives in RAID 0 because RAID 0 doesn't really increase performance, look at the link I posted it pretty much says the same thing.

Installing the OS and applications will be faster because you are writing data at effectively twice the speed but at the same time its not like its going to be lightning fast.

And if you look at some of the bench marks on that article the numbers really aren't that much different. Its a fluff article that relies soley on benchmarks for numbers. I mean do you think you are going to tell the difference between an average of 4ms (thats milliseconds) difference on access time?

The bottom line is, you are better off spending your money on one high end drive than you are setting up a RAID.
 
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