Drive Options

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synaps3

Gawd
Joined
Mar 15, 2006
Messages
957
Which would be faster- my 7200RPM SATA Deskstar or a RAID array of some sort with 2 5400RPM IDE drives that have IDE to SATA converters on them. Is a RAID array even possible with a converter like this one?: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...sPageName=MERC_VI_ReBay_Pr4_PcY_BIN_Stores_IT And if so, which RAID would be the best to use and how would I set it up?

Sorry to ask so many questions, just experimenting with options I have on a build...
 
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I was about to post my usual "depends on the application" post, but honestly, I don't remember seeing "some sort of 5400rpm" drive in a while, prompting me to think that just from an areal density standpoint the recent SATA drive will be faster.

So, I am going out on a limb, but I say: 7200rpm Deskstar, provided it is recent.
 
The IDE 5400 RPM drive is a 300Gb Maxtor Maxline II. It is not that old, maybe a year or 2. I will be getting another if the RAID array is faster, 300Gb is more appealing than 80Gb.

I read up on Wikipedia about RAID and I believe I will probably use RAID 1; I used to get along fine on 40Gb on my old computer, I can never see me using more than 300Gb. RAID 0, according to Wikipedia, will provide no noticable performance increase. Theoretically, then RAID 1 should provide about 2x increase, because the disks are simply clones. This means a good RAID driver may be able to read every other byte off one disk, and the others off the second disk. Wouldn't that cause a SIGNIFICANT speed boost, or is my logic flawed?

Thanks for the help so far... Any other opinions? Some sort of a benchmark or something would be nice to compare the options...
 
I think that the problem will be the fact that most cheap RAID-1 implementations will not read simultaneously from the two disks.
 
Alright, I will keep the SATA drive as the primary and use the Maxtor IDE one as a secondary. Thanks for the help.
 
I think you were misunderstanding the differences between RAID0 and RAID1, but in all, you're conclusions are correct. Stick with the SATA drive as C: and make the larger, slower drive D.
 
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