one WD1500ADFD vs two WD360ADFD raid-0

Torsten · Dec 18, 2006

Space is not an issue, as I have a larger SATA drive for file storage.

A single raptor 150 and two raptor 36's are each running $200 new.

Thoughts?

Lazn_Work · Dec 18, 2006

Personal choice. One 150 is what I would go for, but you may want to try RAID 0..

For boot times, the additional wait for the RAID bios is likely to offset any gains in drive performance.

For game level loading times, it depends on the game, but usually RAID 0 is 3-4 seconds improvement.

For reliability, RAID 0 is more likely to have problems, though that may not be a factor for you.

So it really is up to you. If you are doing anything that gets large gains from a hight STR then RAID 0 would help, but with a total of 74GB.. it might not be worth it for that. (video editing, raw audio capture, database hosting etc)

EnderW · Dec 18, 2006

I wouldn't expect a noticeable difference in gaming either way

as long as you have a bigger storage drive to keep a drive image on, I'd give RAID-0 a try

cooter · Dec 18, 2006

The difference will be very neglegable. the 150's are newer and faster as a single drive compared to the 36gigers. Raid 0 offers a tiny tiny performance boost. It is very small in fact. Without trying to start a Raid war again I will say (with evidence on my computer at home) that there is almost no difference in performance between a single drive and Raid for a gaming computer.

With that said, go with the 150 giger.

I have run a few raid arrays in the past and I do recommend it to people. The only reason is so that they can learn about it and find out that there really is not performance difference.

este · Dec 18, 2006

Lazn_Work said:
Personal choice. One 150 is what I would go for, but you may want to try RAID 0..

For boot times, the additional wait for the RAID bios is likely to offset any gains in drive performance.

For game level loading times, it depends on the game, but usually RAID 0 is 3-4 seconds improvement.

For reliability, RAID 0 is more likely to have problems, though that may not be a factor for you.

So it really is up to you. If you are doing anything that gets large gains from a hight STR then RAID 0 would help, but with a total of 74GB.. it might not be worth it for that. (video editing, raw audio capture, database hosting etc)

QFT. Its nice to see that not everyone thinks RAID0 is the devil.

I look at it like this:

Raptor = Performance, reliability, Expensive for the space you get (thus need to add a storage drive)

RAID0 = Performance, less reliability, Cheap, performance to storage ratio is excellent

If I were you I'd go with the Raptor since you already have a storage drive. If you didn't have that, but did have a good controller I'd recommend RAID0

ButterFlyEffect78 · Dec 18, 2006

I see alot of people are confused the way raid0 works. It does offer a slight speed up on things because it does in fact deliver up to 20% in read performance. The major improvement having raid 0 is bandwidth or throughput under certain circumstances such as transfering large files or copying between folder to folder. In fact, I own two raptors and I ran a test against my single data drive and my raid 0 config. was exactly 2x faster copying a same exact file. So, just think of raid0 something like dual core cpu, better multitasking, encoding, etc..... But it is very ignorant to say raid0 offers lil or no performance over a singel drive.

EnderW · Dec 18, 2006

cooter said:
The difference will be very neglegable. the 150's are newer and faster as a single drive compared to the 36gigers

don't confuse the WD360GD with the WD360ADFD

ButterFlyEffect78 said:
I see alot of people are confused the way raid0 works.

me too

Team Obi Juan · Dec 18, 2006

I say RAID 0 just cause it's fun to tool around with something you're not familiar with. But, I like learning new things with computers and hardware.

Read up on stripe sizes though, I still need to do that and I'll redo my array with a different stripe size soon.

Sunin · Dec 18, 2006

raid 0 2 150's

drizzt81 · Dec 18, 2006

ButterFlyEffect78 said:
I see alot of people are confused the way raid0 works.

From the impression that I have gathered over the past years, I would say that the confusion isn't over how R-0 works, since that is pretty simple, but rather about how particular implementations of R-0 works. The effect that R-0 has for "gaming" performance is also an issue over which there is much discussion.

Zamboni · Dec 19, 2006

Sunin said:
raid 0 2 150's

Which leads to the next question: two 150's, or four 36's? Given the number of open SATA ports on newer boards, would a four-drive array offer any advantage?

tuskenraider · Dec 19, 2006

Which leads to the next question: two 150's, or four 36's?

I know this was asked because of price comparison, but I'll reiterate that the ADFD 36GB drives offer just as much performance as the 150GB drive. But to answer your question, it would be two 150's since the seek times will start to diminish over two drives(losing "quickness" of the drives) and the benefit of increased STR's isn't gonna help your typical desktop and gaming usage. Also, I've noticed and timed the benefit of RAID0 on my system and like the performance increase.

drizzt81 · Dec 19, 2006

Zamboni said:
Which leads to the next question: two 150's, or four 36's? Given the number of open SATA ports on newer boards, would a four-drive array offer any advantage?

The 4-disk array would certainly consume more power.

cooter · Dec 19, 2006

ButterFlyEffect78 said:
I see alot of people are confused the way raid0 works. It does offer a slight speed up on things because it does in fact deliver up to 20% in read performance. The major improvement having raid 0 is bandwidth or throughput under certain circumstances such as transfering large files or copying between folder to folder. In fact, I own two raptors and I ran a test against my single data drive and my raid 0 config. was exactly 2x faster copying a same exact file. So, just think of raid0 something like dual core cpu, better multitasking, encoding, etc..... But it is very ignorant to say raid0 offers lil or no performance over a singel drive.

Do not confuse a benchmark performance increase with a real world performance increase. If you were to benchmark 2 drives in RAID0 and compare them with a single drive you will see that the RAID drives perform approximately 2x as well as the single drive. If are are looking at game and application load times you will see that this trend does not continue, the performance difference will be from 0-10%. With the increase in bandwidth you have an increase in latency which lowers performance, kinda a give and take. So you may get an increase in Read and write performance but you lose a bit cause of latency.

Hard drive benchmarks do not tell the truth about RAID 0 Performance. It really comes down to what you will be using the drives for. If you are going to be gaming, stick with one drive. If you are going to be transferring alot of really large files constantly then RAID0 may be worth it.

Have a look at this article, it is non bias and done for real world use:
http://www.overclockers.com/articles1063/
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

To save you some reading here is the first part of the conclusion from the anandtech article:

Anandtech said:
If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

And the final thoughts on the overclockers article:

Conrad aka Vio1 in OC Forum said:
As to how Raid-0 stacks up against a single Raptor, the only difference is in the benchmark scores - other then that, in real world use there is NO REAL IMPROVEMENT in load up times.

Anyway

ButterFlyEffect78 said:
I see alot of people are confused the way raid0 works.

I think you are confused

ButterFlyEffect78 said:
But it is very ignorant to say raid0 offers lil or no performance over a singel drive.

I think you should reconsider this remark

EnderW said:
me too

and this one

If that does not open your eyes then let me know and I will go home and get the tests that I did on a couple of my RAID Arrays.

So for real world performance increases it is not worth it but RAID0 may make your e-penis bigger.

I wish i didn't have to keep posting this stuff.

tuskenraider · Dec 19, 2006

If are are looking at game and application load times you will see that this trend does not continue, the performance difference will be from 0-10%.

Well I'm sorry I get 15-20% on my PC. Is that enough of a differentiation to still call that "no improvement"? I think so and the rest can decide for themselves.

So for real world performance increases it is not worth it but RAID0 may make your e-penis bigger.

I don't let you decide for me if it's "worth it" and neither should anyone else.

I wish i didn't have to keep posting this stuff.

Ditto.

este · Dec 19, 2006

tuskenraider said:
Ditto.

x2!

People who read random articles and then consider themselves experts without ever having used a raid0 setup should not be allowed to post here.

I love my raid0 setup. I don't say it smokes a single raptor on level loading b/c it doesn't.

BUT it is just as or a little faster. AND I payed ~$184 for 500Gb RAID0 + 48Gb in RAID1.

For more money, equal performance and WAY less space I just can't justify a single drive... that is if you are not scared of RAID0.

cooter · Dec 19, 2006

este said:
People who read random articles and then consider themselves experts without ever having used a raid0 setup should not be allowed to post here.

I see where your coming from, besides the fact your refering to me. maybe i don't konw what I am talking about, but here are some tests I ran for myself just to verify results, basically I didn't listen to some "Random Articles", I wanted to see for myself. (I also don't consider Anandtech "Random").

Anyway I did timed tests for loading of programs I use with RAID 0, with different Strip sizes and both IDE and SCSI. Here are more results that back up what I posted earlier. I also have some Benchmarks which really show nothing.

All the links are Screenshots of Synthetic Benchmarks, I do not really pay attention to them. If you look at the Excel spreadsheets you will see timed load times for things I do on a regular basis. These are a couple years old but still the same concept.

SCSI (Time in Seconds):

IDE RAID 0:
http://www.kanaja.com/forum_images/IDE-ATTO-RIAD0.JPG
http://www.kanaja.com/forum_images/HDtach-IDE-RAID0.JPG
http://www.kanaja.com/forum_images/PC_Mark_RAID0IDE.bmp

IDE Single Drive:
http://www.kanaja.com/forum_images/IDE-ATTO-Single.JPG
http://www.kanaja.com/forum_images/PCMark_Single_driveIDE.bmp

IntelOwnz · Dec 19, 2006

Ok guys, concidering the WD360ADFD offers damn near close performance as the WD1500ADFD, even if RAID offered ANY performance increase at all, you would def see an increase because the drives are near identical.

Some people here seem to be mixing up the old GD with the new ADFD, there is a HUGE difference.

My vote,
Buy two WD360ADFD and go RAID-0

Less reliability usually because you double your chance of losing your data if one disk dies, but WD gives a full 5 year warranty and they don't seem to be having much problems, they are concidered an "Enterprise Class Hard Drive" so you're getting much more reliability then a regular "Consumer Grade Drive"

revenant · Dec 19, 2006

removed

drizzt81 · Dec 20, 2006

IntelOwnz said:
...if RAID offered ANY performance increase at all...

See that is what some people are debating as well. According to that rogue post on SR, it may be that R-0 offers a performance decrease. In the end it comes down to whether people believe SR, Anandtech or the OCForums post. The bottom line is that I do not understand why people are so religious about it. Let the OP run his RAID-0, if he wants to. If he comes back in 4 weeks and asks us how to get his data back... tough luck.

cooter · Dec 20, 2006

drizzt81 said:
See that is what some people are debating as well. According to that rogue post on SR, it may be that R-0 offers a performance decrease. In the end it comes down to whether people believe SR, Anandtech or the OCForums post. The bottom line is that I do not understand why people are so religious about it. Let the OP run his RAID-0, if he wants to. If he comes back in 4 weeks and asks us how to get his data back... tough luck.

To True.

Anyway, i did not post all that stuff simply to cause a war about who is right. I think all the information I provided will give the OP more then enough information to decide what to do. to me it appeared he was not sure what route to go. I feel that the 150 is a better choice simply because you get more storage space for about the same cost as putting the two drives in RAID0. I am not totally against RAID0, hell I have run it for quite some time. But on a cost vs. performance vs. Storage space basis, I think (obviously this is my opinion) that the 150 GB Raptor is the way to go.

Torsten · Dec 20, 2006

Thanks for all the info, although the discussion steered in a direction I wasn't expecting

I am actually quite familiar with raptors in raid-0. I ran a pair of the original 36's in raid-0 when they first appeared on the scene. Later I ran a pair of 74's, and I have since built many systems with dual 74's and quad 74's for commercial purposes.

My question was intended to try and produce some gaming benchmark results for the NEW 36gb raptor in comparison to the 150gb version with identical specs but different platter density. I've searched and havn't been able to produce a direct comparsion, although it appears the 150 is a good margin faster.

I'm sorry if I steered this toward a 'raid for gaming' debate.

If people produced results that the drive performance for both were identical, then I would probobly make the 'personal decision' to run two 36gb's in raid-0; whereas another might choose to run a single 150.

So if anyone has any results on the new 36, or better yet, the new 36 compared to a 150, please enlighten me.

Thanks,

tuskenraider · Dec 20, 2006

So if anyone has any results on the new 36, or better yet, the new 36 compared to a 150, please enlighten me.

As I stated before, all the new 16MB cache drives perform pretty much the same. Will 36's show quicker access time with less hardware to move? 150's show better STR's with more heads and platters? Too close to call it seems. I posted graphs in this thread at the bottom that are referenced from a sticky at PCPerspective forums.

one WD1500ADFD vs two WD360ADFD raid-0

Which is faster for gaming?

WD1500ADFD x1

WD360ADFD x2

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