RvR (Raptor vs RAID)

J

joeswm8

New Member
why would you buy a 150GB raptor for 225 when you could buy 2 320GB drives and a RAID1 card for less than 225. Putting the 320 GB drives in RAID1 gives you 14k read time vs 10k read time of the Raptor. And you get it backed up right away too in RAID 1, and double the space!

so why would someone go Raptor over RAID1?
 
You cant just double the RPMs for the drives... and you dont even need to buy a RAID card if you have a motherboard newer than like 2004.
 
Because it doesn't work like that :)

Putting two 320GB harddrives in RAID0 (I think you got your RAIDs mixed up, RAID1 is when you have 2 mirrored harddrives) would give you at maximum double the performance of one 320GB harddrive (though it almost never reaches maximum potential).
 
from RAID 101:
RAID1 - Mirroring
RAID1 is an implemention of drive mirroring, for every pair of drives (because RAID1 is done in pairs), the contents of DriveA is mirrored in real-time to DriveB
The advantage of RAID1 is that there is a very solid 1-level of Fault Tolerance (i.e., one drive can completely fail without any loss of data); the downside is that it is not very space efficient (drive capacity of a two-drive pair will be the size of the smaller of the two)
Since data is stored across both drives, read-performance will be (theoretically) twice that of the individual drive; write performance will be that of the slowest drive.
A minimum of two drives is required
Click to expand...

it says the read time is double...
 
It will be (theoretically) doubled. But so is the same as SLI and crossfire, and it never comes close to doubling. Plus, RAID 1 is for safety as one drive can fail and you won't lose data. RAID 0 is more for performance gain.
 
joeswm8 said:
why would you buy a 150GB raptor for 225 when you could buy 2 320GB drives and a RAID1 card for less than 225. Putting the 320 GB drives in RAID1 gives you 14k read time vs 10k read time of the Raptor. And you get it backed up right away too in RAID 1, and double the space!

so why would someone go Raptor over RAID1?
Click to expand...

Wow... RAID1 is worse performance wise then a single drive, because it has to copy the date to both drives. What your thinking of is RAID0, where it splits the data up between the drives.

And as others have said, you dont double the speed, it's still at 7,200RPM's. All that gets raised is the transfer rates.

The raptors are better then a RAID0 array because it can access files much quicker (~2ms vs ~8ms), and has a higher transfer rate then a single 7200RPM drive.
 
oh lol stupid me

so RAID 1 is all about backup? so it takes the time of the slowest drive to write, but why would it take double to read, wouldnt it be the read time of the slowest drive?

and RAID 0 is all about what? because RAID 101 said no improvement in random access times, and you only have the space of the smallest drive, so whats it used for?
 
Last edited:
It doesn't take 2x as long to read in a RAID1. You are looking at random read performance that is better than a single drive but worse most other RAID levels. The sequential read performance is about the same as a single drive.

RAID0 helps the most when you are accessing big files (ie not random access).
 
so then a 10k raptor blows any RAID configuration to bits?

and a nice setup would be a 36GB Raptor for OS and Apps, and a 320GB seagate for storage, correct?
 
Not any RAID, but a raptor is fairly good all around. I would just use the 320GB seagate drive, but I don't mind if a something takes a few seconds longer to load. If you really want a raptor, the raptors with model numbers WD###ADFD are the best ones available. They come in 36, 74 and 150GB versions
 
Last edited:
look what I found in good ol' wiki:

"To maximize performance benefits of RAID 1, independent disk controllers are recommended, one for each disk. Some refer to this practice as splitting or duplexing. When reading, both disks can be accessed independently and requested sectors can be split evenly between the disks. For the usual mirror of two disks this would double the transfer rate. The apparent access time of the array would be half that of a single non raid drive. Unlike RAID 0 this would be for all access patterns as all the data is present on all the disks. Read performance can be further improved by adding drives to the mirror. Three disks would give you three times the throughput and an apparent seek time of a third."

it says here that access times are cut in half, effectively giving two 320GB drives at 7.2k in RAID1 total seek time of 14k?? but it would double the transfer rate...what exactly is the transfer rate? How would I do that, what exactly is duplexing, and can the eVga 680i do that already?
 
I'm not entirely sure on that, but there are some members here who have a RAID0 array, and the only thing that is increased is the transfer rate, but no where near double.

Even with multiple drives, the data cant be accessed as quickly on a 7200RPM drive as it can on a 10K RPM drive.
 
it makes perfect sense, it accesses half of the data at 7200RPM and the other half at 7200RPM at the same exact time, giving you a total of 14400RPM. Isnt this right?

Does anyone have a RAID 1 configuration?

And what is "transfer"?
 
joeswm8 said:
it makes perfect sense, it accesses half of the data at 7200RPM and the other half at 7200RPM at the same exact time, giving you a total of 14400RPM. Isnt this right?

Does anyone have a RAID 1 configuration?

And what is "transfer"?
Click to expand...

RAID 1 doesnt do that, RAID 1 is a mirror array, meaning that both drives are identical.

And no, that doesnt make sense. If a single 7200RPM drive has an access time of 8ms, then no matter how many drives are in the array, it will take at least 8ms for it to read a piece of data.

And transfer rate, meaning the speed data is transferred.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top