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16 MB Cache make a difference?

I too am looking at these for my next rig - I am thinking of four of these in RAID 0 or 5 - does anyone know what the speed comparison is like when comparing four drive RAID 0 to four drive RAID 5 ? any body know where I can find benchmarks of this drive in four drive RAID 0 or 5?

what kind of boost do you get with 16MB drives in RAID over normal 8MB drives?
 
Well, the drive you selected is a spectacular performer. In some areas it's better than the Raptor, at a much more reasonable capacity and price/GB figure. I'd say it's within the top 3 desktop hard drives right now, based on Storage Review performance evaluations.
 
TheGoat Eater said:
I too am looking at these for my next rig - I am thinking of four of these in RAID 0 or 5 - does anyone know what the speed comparison is like when comparing four drive RAID 0 to four drive RAID 5 ? any body know where I can find benchmarks of this drive in four drive RAID 0 or 5?

what kind of boost do you get with 16MB drives in RAID over normal 8MB drives?
Click to expand...

RAID5 performance relies heavily on the controller...or RAID card that you'll be using.
 
Volkum said:
RAID5 performance relies heavily on the controller...or RAID card that you'll be using.
Click to expand...
I'm thinking about using the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe's RAID controller
 
In August I upgraded from a Western Digital 120 gig 8 meg cache drive, to a Maxtor 300 gig 16 meg cache harddrive and it is twice as fast in the windows HD tester. My load times dropped in everything dramatically, I am the first person on 64 player BF2 servers almost every single time.

On my old WD drive it could take up to 3 minutes to change maps in BF2, now it is 40 seconds.

If you want more information on drives and a more technical analysis between 8 and 16 meg cache drives, the only website you should need is www.storagereview.com I have been reading them ever since they ripped apart every other hard drive review on the net when Ultra 66 first hit the market and there was so much FUB being spread even by big name sites. They are the experts and they have an awesome test bed.
 
TheGoat Eater said:
I'm thinking about using the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe's RAID controller
Click to expand...
1) Don't put 4 drives in raid 0. You will regret it.

2) That isn't real hardware raid; expect not-so-great speeds from it.

 
unhappy_mage said:
1) Don't put 4 drives in raid 0. You will regret it.

2) That isn't real hardware raid; expect not-so-great speeds from it.

Click to expand...

Yep... And if you're gaming off an array, expect less performance since it will substantially increase your access times.
 
unhappy_mage said:
1) Don't put 4 drives in raid 0. You will regret it.

2) That isn't real hardware raid; expect not-so-great speeds from it.

Click to expand...

so what should I choose for my HD setup?
 
TheGoat Eater said:
so what should I choose for my HD setup?
Click to expand...

Why exactly do you want raid? Just for speed? So you can say "I have RAID"?

Many, many websites have looked into Raid just for a speed boost and there isn't really much there if you are using anything other that synthetic benchmarks. Just for surfing the web and gaming it isn't worth it. This changes if you are going to use your computer as a server or anything.

I think you would be much better off just getting one of the the new Hitachi 500 gig drives that are on the leader board at storagereview.com.

http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Storage-Devices/RAID-Not-Such-a-Clever-Idea-for-Your-Home-PC/1/ said:
Reputed technical websites like StorageReview have often commented that gains on RAID 0 vs single hard disk are minimal at best. Test after test by some of the most reputed technical websites have proved that RAID 0 does not significantly improve desktop performance. Not even with the far higher risk of a four disk RAID 0 array. Seriously! Very few home users tend to be aware of all these technical studies and those that do very often pooh-pooh the idea that the RAID configuration they spent a lot of money on is not actually running faster.

If the claim that RAID 0 is not all it's cracked up to be sounds illogical then it's worth taking the time to read the reviews. A search in Google should lead you to them. Except for a few limited high I/O activities like video editing -- and the typical application benchmark -- the speed gains are almost non-existent. For the average PC user RAID 0 is as useful as a rear spoiler on an 800cc car. It looks good, it sounds impressive but it don't do nuffin'.
Click to expand...
 
Also since you wanted to put 4 drives in RAID it sounds like you have money to burn. I say invest in SCSI then, get a nice 15,000k drive. Makes more sense than hooking up 4 SATA disks, man that would be a pain.
 
TheGoat Eater said:
so what should I choose for my HD setup?
Click to expand...
Well, depending on budget, maybe a boot disk, an applications disk, and a data disk/array. If I had say $1000 to build my disk setup, I'd go for this for gaming performance:
Fujitsu MAU 36gb - 2; 1 for boot and one for games => $175x2
Highpoint 1820a - $210
Maxtor Maxline 3 300gb - enough to finish out the budget (probably 4)

This gives a good fast place to install windows, another seperate disk to put WoW and whatever you want on, and a place to store all your music and movies. Run the array in raid 5 mode so you can have redundancy. Note that I've already got a scsi adapter; you'd need to buy one and a cable to use those disks.

For a little cheaper setup with more capacity, look at Hitachi drives; they're the fastest in single-disk SATA configurations. Get one for Windows and one for games, and spread data across them once you've got everything installed. This is about half the price, and probably 3/4 of the performance. Once you start getting into multi-disk setups you're looking at diminishing returns.

 
This LSI card will do fine. If you've got a pci-e slot you want to use, too bad; the cheapest one Newegg has is $620. Pci should be enough bandwidth, but you can always get a workstation with Pci-X to get faster transfer rates. Order the disks from Zipzoomfly.com, they pack disks better than Newegg and one can never take too many chances. here, here, and here.

BTW, JBOD refers to sticking disks together. It's sort of like RAID, but without interleaving the disk sectors. So you don't even need JBOD capability to do what you want, which I assume is two seperate disks - C: with windows on it and D: with games on it.

 
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