Optimising the HDD bottleneck

[schmeggin]

Hi all,

I want to get the best hard drive performance - but don't need to spend $s just for the sake of it. I use the PC for dev (multithreaded Java apps on app servers), office applications and some video editing (home stuff).

I have read a lot about RAID and WD Raptors and looked at the benchmarks - but really believe some of this is just marketing hype. Whether the max transfer rate or some biased benchmarks show this to be faster than that, what I am concerned with is real-world performance.

Basically, here are the set-ups that I need to choose between:
1. 1 WD Raptor 10000rpm for OS, 2 X Seagate 7200.7 80GB NCQ RAID 0 for data
2. 1 WD Raptor 10000rpm for OS, 1 Seagate 7200.7 160GB NCQ for data
3. 1 Seagate 7200.7 160GB NCQ for OS & data

Option 1&2 come in about $200US. Option 3 is about $100US. A lot of reports that I have read put the Seagate 7200.7 NCQ very close to the WD Raptor 10000rpm in all real-world situations (but not in max transfer speed).

RAID 0 is supposed to have minimal gains in the sort of scenarios that I use the computer in.

So what do people recommend in terms of real-world use and not biased benchmarks?

 

[schmeggin]

Some results

Anandtech has an intersting article on this:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2073&p=2

The only test where there is is any real difference between the WD Raptor and the Seagate 7200.7 is the "Pure HDD performance." This leads me to believe that if you were building a File Server, you may fork out the $s for the WD Raptors - otherwise the difference is very small.

 

[Praetor]

I use the PC for dev (multithreaded Java apps on app servers), office applications and some video editing (home stuff).

Configuration 1 will be the best naturally but also the most expensive (and it drops for OConfigurations 2 and 3) but if you're doing serious stuff with the drives, get serious (aka real) RAID like RAID3 or RAID5 ... RAID0 wont cut it (especially with serious stuff.... do you wanna rsik losing everything?)

 

[schmeggin]

Configuration 1 will be the best naturally but also the most expensive (and it drops for OConfigurations 2 and 3) but if you're doing serious stuff with the drives, get serious (aka real) RAID like RAID3 or RAID5 ... RAID0 wont cut it (especially with serious stuff.... do you wanna rsik losing everything?)

Thanks Praetor. I have been thinking more and more of RAID 0+1. I would always back up to DVD or Tape as well. But it seems you can get quite a bit of speed on one partition and still keep source files on a mirrored partition with the new controllers that come on the latest Pentium mobos. I mean if you loose the RAID 0 partition that would be pretty annoying, but when you replace the broken disk, you will still have a mirrored array and can re-build the striped partition - re-installing the OS and apps from early images and back-ups.

What do you think about the speed of the RAID 0 with only 2 disks in one partition? I'd probably get Seagate 7200.7 NCQ disks.