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There is definitely a difference between drive BER and system BER. Controller cards or CPUs without ECC RAM are both sources of additional errors. A big study by Google found that errors from non-ECC RAM alone are at least an order of magnitude higher than generally assumed (something like...

What do you mean by "quite high"? As I said, consumer drives are typically 10x worse. Drives like the Caviar Black or the Raptor are 10^15; consumer drives include the Baracuda XT and 7200.12, which are 10^14. And yes, the issue with "heroic error recovery" -- aka deep recovery cycle -- is...

That depends on your tolerance for data loss (as well as your budget). With a single 2TB drive, at any point in time you have 1.5% chance of not being able to read all of the data on a single drive. Since the BERs are the same, with a 1TB drive, the chance of an error drops by half to 0.8%...

Yes, block combining and algorithms to reduce write amplification are different than background GC. See: http://hothardware.com/News/OCZ-and-Indilinx-Collaborate-On-New-SSD-Garbage-Collection-Scheme/ http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=760...

For maximum reliability, I highly recommend RAID-6, 1TB maximum sized drives, and small span groups -- such as 2+2. Then you can combined as many span groups in RAID-60 as you need for the total data you need. It also helps reliability quite a bit to use SAS drives instead of SATA, but they're...

Go for an SSD. The 40GB Intel X25-V is $100 at Newegg.

No. GC is not the same as TRIM. Intel introduced TRIM for the G2. No Intel drives use GC yet. GC is available with current Indilinx and Samsung controllers.

There are a number of physical differences between the Caviar Black and the RE3: http://techreport.com/articles.x/15588 Of course, whether those differences are important in your environment is a completely different question.

My understanding is that quick format issues TRIM on all unused space (when the drives are connected to the ICH). Not exactly the same as a true secure erase, but pretty close in terms of its effect on SSD performance.

If you don't want to hassle with HDDerase and a bootable CD, etc, a quick format from Windows will do most (but not all) of the same thing. In either case, the drive needs to be connected to the south bridge / ICH and the BIOS should be set to IDE mode, not ACHI or RAID. Be careful with...

I use the WD RE3 drives -- they have decent performance and much better data reliability specs than the regular consumer drives. $119 for 1TB is a great price.

In most games, disk performance only matters at level changes, not during gameplay. SSDs are the fastest by far--they are probably the single best thing you can do to improve the overall performance of your system. You can get an 80GB Intel X25-M G2 for about $200 -- buy one now, and a bunch...

I like the Intels. You might check out the X25-V, particularly if size and write performance aren't critical. It holds 40GB.

With a large average file size and multiple readers, you will benefit from a larger stripe size. 8 drives in RAID 6 means you have 6 active drives. You might try a 64KB strip (384KB stripe) -- but the optimal number depends heavily on the details of your setup. Running a few benchmarks is...

Caviar Black drives don't work well in RAID. For best performance, you would put all 4 drives in RAID 0, and use narrow partitions. Bad idea, though. You also said you want some protection, which conflicts with best performance. I would put the Blue drives in a RAID 1 mirror for reliability...

Supermicro's large EE-ATX motherboards are a fairly proprietary form factor. But their cases hold standard ATX and E-ATX boards, and their ATX and E-ATX boards fit well in standard cases. One of the reasons I like Supermicro is because they aren't afraid to push the envelope, even if that...

Actually, given equivalent bit density, multi-platter drives should be faster than single-platter drives for random data access, since the heads don't have to travel as far to cover a given number of blocks. For example, in a drive with two 500GB platters configured to have two 500GB...

On rotating media, read and write speeds differ depending on the location that the data resides on the disk. Early partitions and data are faster than later ones. So, depending on how full your volumes are, how they're partitioned, and which software you're using for your throughput tests, the...

I think the main reason would be performance, particularly if you're using SSD. If you're using 4 or less HDDs or don't care about perf, then it's probably fine. Here's a link to a review that might be helpful: http://www.overclockersonline.net/index.php?page=articles&num=2671...

CDW caters to businesses -- Newegg is more consumer-focused. Prices are generally higher at CDW; you pay a premium for having an account rep, etc. FWIW, it seems like what must be going on with the X25Ms is that Intel has stopped shipping the G1s before their G2 production was fully ramped-up...

There are also the 4:1 hot-swap adapters, like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817993017 also available for SAS: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817993018 Unfortunately at $46.99 for the SATA version, they aren't cheap. I'm also...

I'm just starting on a new high-end PC build, and have decided to use SSD this time around. I've resisted RAID in the past for many reasons, including noise. The idea of having silent, low-power SSD that's also fast has been enough to prompt me to build a new system. I have a few questions: --...

Are there any other RAID controllers yet besides the 9260-8i that work with PCIe 2.0?