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Looking for a speed boost -- RAID 0

M

Monkeypillow

Gawd
Joined
Aug 30, 2006
Messages
880
Where's the current sweet spot for two striped drives. The Western Digital 640GB drives seem popular, but there are 1TB drives for not much more. Do most of the 1TB drives in that price range have lower platter density than the WD 640GB?

I know the 640GB WD drives have two platters, but most manufacturers don't publish those kind of specifications.
 
What is your storage requirements and budget?

Your best performance increase would be some kind of SSD setup.

But if that will not meet your requirements, the WD 640 Blacks are very popular around the forums. Unless you need the storage space, going with TB drives over the 640s would be a waste of money as they offer similar performance.

Don
 
I do need storage space, but these will be for applications, so a couple of 640GB drives should be fine. I'd rather wait until SSD is cheaper and more supported before doing that. Maybe in a year or so.
 
How often have fellow Hardforum members experienced hard drive failures when using Raid 0? I'm thinking about buying two of the Caviar Black 640GB drives but I'm hoping they'll last a reasonable amount of time.
 
Sensui said:
How often have fellow Hardforum members experienced hard drive failures when using Raid 0? I'm thinking about buying two of the Caviar Black 640GB drives but I'm hoping they'll last a reasonable amount of time.
Click to expand...

I'm running 3 pairs of stripped arrays in my desktop, two of them are pairs of Seagate 500gb/32mb 7200.11, and the other is a pair of WD black 640gbs. I do a lot of work with virtual machines and do a fair amount of copying the VM images between the arrays. The oldest of the seagates is over a year old, the WD blacks are the newest and they've been running for about six months.

Every hard drive will eventually fail - my sister-in-law just had her hard drive die and she lost all kinds of records pertinent to her divorce and child custody fight. So whether you run RAID0 or not, get some good backup software (like Acronis Home) and back things up and then you don't have to worry so much about a failure.
 
Sensui said:
How often have fellow Hardforum members experienced hard drive failures when using Raid 0? I'm thinking about buying two of the Caviar Black 640GB drives but I'm hoping they'll last a reasonable amount of time.
Click to expand...

As long as you have a good back-up plan Raid 0 is fine. Those are good drives. It's very unlikely you will have a problem.
 
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