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3x7200.10's and Raid 5?

M

Medic1542

n00b
Joined
Feb 7, 2006
Messages
27
Hey guys, I was hoping you could help me out. I'm buying a new computer and was going to get the 150 raptor but the tech at the shop told me that I should get 3 320Gb 7200.10 Barracudas in a RAID5 setup instead.

He stated it would be better for both OS loading and video encoding.

I don't know much about RAID 5 and tried to search the forums but i don't see why he would recommend this... is he right?

I do a lot of video encoding and am worried that RAID5 is not the best choice. Is there something special about running the perpendicular drives in RAID5?

System so far:
e6600 C2D
P5N32-e SLI motherboard
8800GTX (yay!)
2 gb ram
scythe ninja heatsink
p180b case
 
He's full of crap, to be blunt. No number of 7200.10 drives in raid 5 will be better at OS loading. The Raptor makes a good boot disk; if you want to add on a bunch of bulk storage, then look at raid 5. Motherboard-based raid 5 isn't generally fast at random I/O, which is more or less what starting Windows entails.

Video encoding isn't generally as disk-limited as video editing is; what are your input bandwidths typically like? Are you capturing to uncompressed video and then compressing in a separate pass, or capturing directly to output format?
 
I would go with the raptor for the boot drive, and a raid 5 array for media, i do a lot of mpeg2 editing, and fast hard drive access helped a lot on removing commercials on hd shows record on my htpc...
 
Medic1542 said:
Is there something special about running the perpendicular drives in RAID5?
Click to expand...
No, there is not. "Perpendicular" drives offer nothing other than an improvement in data density. Using perpendicular recording is likely to yield the same type of advantages that were apparent in all previous data density improvements:
  • shorter seek distances on equally sized data
  • higher STR
this list may not be complete
 
Thanks for the replies.

A couple more questions:

1) Let's assume I'm not going to go for the raptor. Is there any advantage to RAID5 performance wise as opposed to a non-RAID setup for the system I listed?

2) I obviously will use this system for gaming as well. Will the raptor show a noticable difference in load times (as in seconds) as opposed to the seagates? Everybody talks about millisecond seek times etc... but how does that translate into noticable everyday experience?

Thanks for your help guys. The reason I'm so borderline is that the raptor is so expensive and I like my storage but I also like my gaming. :)
 
1) No. Quite the opposite.

2) That depends on what you mean by "noticeable". Yes, it'll probably be faster, but not so substantially that a Raptor is a must-have for everyone.
 
Well,
I went with the raptor, figuring I could always build my own raid5 array later on if I needed. I have plenty of larger drives from my previous build that I can use for storage. The tech guy was still convinced that I would be taking a "performance hit" though... strange.

Thanks for your help.
 
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