7200 or 10k??

[animeguru]

I'm building a SCSI RAID 5 array with some equipment I've got and I wanted to know if I would see a real performance difference between 7200 and 10k RPM drives?? The arrays will be used as a video server for viewing DVDs throughout the house.

As it is, I'm fairly cheap and I'd like to save a couple of bucks if I can (but hey, who wouldn't ). Anyway, the drives I'm buying will be refurbs and there seems to be a definate price break between the 7200 and 10k models.

Any thoughts?? WIll the 10k make enough difference to warrant the price increase??

Thanks!

 

[M0rph3us]

Well, that depends on which 10K you buy. If it's a first gen super-loud 10K drive, probably not much difference from 7200. If it's a 10K.6 then yes, it'll definitely be faster. definitely...and I don't think they make 7200RPM drives any more, and if they do you can bet they don't put much research $$ into making them better like they do the 10Ks. It's a simple factor of nobody uses 7200RPM drives anymore, and alot of companies are using 15Ks now, but 10Ks are still popular. And popular means competitive.

For simple DVD hosting, if you're not going to be watching 6 DVDs across the house simultaneously, then I would recommend IDE or SATA RAID5. It's much much cheaper, and it's huge on storage, something you need for DVDs. You can get a 200GB drive for roughly the same price as a 36GB 10K SCSI.

If you want to get your feet wet, I'd say start small. A single drive and controller will do nicely, or even a 2100S and 2 drives for RAID 0 or 1.

 

[animeguru]

For simple DVD hosting, if you're not going to be watching 6 DVDs across the house simultaneously, then I would recommend IDE or SATA RAID5. It's much much cheaper, and it's huge on storage, something you need for DVDs. You can get a 200GB drive for roughly the same price as a 36GB 10K SCSI.

Pffft.... if I was just doing what was adequate, it wouldn't be very [H]ard, now would it??

Besides, I've already got part of the beast done. Currently the server is a 6U rackmount with Dual P3 550s, LSI MegaRAID 1600 Elite with 10x 9.1GB 10K SCSI drives in RAID 5 internally and an external 4U array housing 8x 36.7GB 10K IBM SCA drives in hot swap bays.

I have two more Sun arrays to attach to this bad boy, an A1000 (hardware RAID) and a D1000 (JBOD). The A1000 will likely have 12x 36.7GB 10K IBM SCA drives in it (I already have 8 of them) while the D1000 will have whatever I can afford to put in it, which isn't much at this point... money is a little tight right now.

I had planned on purchasing some refurb 18GB 10K SCSI drives from Surplus Computers, but when I went to buy them today, they are all out of 10K and only have 7200s left. I didn't think I'd be satisfied with those, but I figured I'd check to see if there was that much of a price difference.


Bah, I may just sell the D1000 to help offset some of the costs I've incured from the rest of the damned thing. Then, when it comes time for more storage, I'll just build a second server and fill it with some SATA drives, I'll probably be killing my poor duallie with all these drives chained off of it anyway.