Which Setup to get?

[ApocalypZ]

I have a few options for new hard drives

WD Raptor 74GB 10k 8MB SATA
WD 120GB 7200 8MB SATA

WD Raptor 74GB 10k 8MB SATA
WD Raptor 36GB 10k 8MB SATA

WD 120GB 7200 8MB SATA - in RAID 0
WD 120GB 7200 8MB SATA - in RAID 0


WD Raptor 36GB 10k 8MB SATA - in RAID 0
WD Raptor 36GB 10k 8MB SATA - in RAID 0
WD 120GB 7200 8MB SATA (extra SATA PCI Card)


So those are my four choices, im in such a debate about it due to make lack of knowledge of RAID setups and how good the raptors really are. My budget is 400 dollars. Do the two drives need to be the same ones to RAID? What exactly is a raid 0?

Which setup would you recommend for performance / stability?

[jamestime88]

raid 0 (also known as striping) is when file data is written simultaneously to multiple drives in the array, which act as a single larger drive. offers high read/write performance but very low relability.
its hard to choose for you which hard drives to get without knowing what your going to use the computer for.

if your doing video editing, i would suggest the 120 gb drives in raid 0 giving you plenty of speed + size.

for general computer use/gaming my personal choice would be one 36gb raptor for a boot drive and to store all your really commonly used aplications, and a 250gb hard drive for everything else.

[stub]

if you're doing SATA, get your storage drives as Seagates-- not only are they quieter, but their 7200.7 Barracuda product line has NATIVE SATA, which is better for performance.

If you want system stability, do NOT have your boot drive as a RAID-- because you're using 2 drives in that RAID 0, that array has twice the chance of failing as it has ZERO redundancy-- if one drive craps out, both drives crap out.

If money is not an issue, go ahead and get two 74 GB Raptors, although I suggest you instead get one 36 GB Raptor as your system drive, and a 120/160/200 GB Seagate 7200.7 as a storage drive.

Try to keep your SATA drives to a minimum, currently all K7 mobos with SATA have it on the PCI bus, and if you have too much data going through there, you're going to have some serious bottlenecking, because of the other things on that bus-- capture cards, network cards, soundcards, etc

the IDE controller, on the other hand, is in the southbridge-- integrated into the chipset. On some higher end K8 mobos, youll see the SATA controller integrated into the chipset.

[ApocalypZ]

So stub, what your saying is, i should use my onboard sata instead of a pci card? Or what exactly are you saying?

[stub]

No what I am saying is, to be on the PCI BUS, something does NOT have to be physically IN one of your PCI slots. On any K7 mobo with SATA youll find today, the SATA controller will always be on the PCI bus, like onboard sound, etc-- these things are integrated into the mobo physically, but otherwise are treated as PCI devices because thats what they are.

[ApocalypZ]

Ah i see. I've pretty much made up my mind, but i need to know this... Would one 36gb raptor perform as well as 2 36gb raptors in a raid 0? (forget the size)

[Benny Blanco]

I think that seagate drive mentioned above is only 60gb per platter. This is why the response time is lower for the native s-ata drive vs. the bridged s-ata drive. I stayed away from both, and bought a seagate 160gb IDE drive (80gb/platter, and its NICE), which I'm using with a serial ata adapter. Down the line I'm sure it will find it's way into a microATX web surfer or some other system which probably won't have s-ata.

The issue of native s-ata vs. the p-ata/s-ata bridge seems to be a non-issue as well, as I have not seen anything that shows a performance advantage for native s-ata over the bridged version.

As far as the PCI bus, stub makes a good point, but at the same time it is also moot. The problem he points out is saturation of the PCI bus. The silicon image controller chip is connected to the south bridge via the PCI bus, just as any PCI card would be (and shares it with onboard audio, usb, firewire, LAN, and some other stuff I think)... but the onboard IDE controller is connected directly to the southbridge, not via the PCI bus like the silicon image s-ata controller. The only solution for this PCI bus saturation (on the nforce2 chipset) is that there is no solution really, except to not use the s-ata controller at all.

You could get a motherboard with S-ATA integrated into the southbridge, which is implemented on the KT600, KT400A I think, and I think the K8T800? And of course the 865/875 intel chipsets.

It is truly a shame that nforce2 doesn't have native s-ata. It is my only complaint about an otherwise perfect chipset in my opinion.

As far as one raptor vs two, the two in raid 0 would have about twice the throughput... that's the whole and only point of raid 0.

Having said that, I'd probably go for the two 36gb raptors in raid 0, and save the rest of your money :)

(edited for clarification/error correction)