Fastest configuration?

V

Val

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 1, 2005
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299
I have space for around 4-6 hard drives and i need at least 1.5GB of storage, but the more the better. I plan on getting either 680 or new P35 motherboard.

What would be the fastest setup for loading, gaming, editing etc?

Edit: forgot to add, i obviously need some data protection for at least 1 hdd failure.
 
;)

Budget reasonably unlimited.

Experience with RAID: yesterday i setup RAID0 on my friends PC in ASUS Commando, that about it :D
 
Budget reasonably unlimited? Then get a nice hardware RAID controller and some Fujitsu MAX series 15K U320 SCSI drives. That would be very expensive though. Plus the MAX series only go up to 146GB but Seagate has some 300GB 15K drives. I don't personally have much experience with what would be the fastest consumer class drives though. I'm sure others here could give you a bunch of options in that arena.
 
Do you need all 1.5TB to be that fast?
IMO you should shoot for a fast system drive and keep games and speed dependant programs and maybe a scratch area for photoshop if your into that and just put some regular drives for the rest of the space.

One option would be to setup 2 (or more) WD raptor 150GB drives in a striped array (RAID 0) and then 2 (or more) seagate 750GB drives (Striped array optional here)

If you keep valuable data on any array (or any disk for that matter) be sure you have a viable backup strategy in place in the form of an exteranl drive, tape, or scheduled DVD burns.
 
I think that 6 HDDs in RAID 10 will be a lot faster then say 2 Raptors in 1 and 4 other HDDs in 10, no?

I dont understand why everyone advices to get a Raptor. Simple 2 disk array is faster and has 3 times more data.

My initial question was more like which array to build, should i get separate controller etc...
 
Val said:
I think that 6 HDDs in RAID 10 will be a lot faster then say 2 Raptors in 1 and 4 other HDDs in 10, no?

I dont understand why everyone advices to get a Raptor. Simple 2 disk array is faster and has 3 times more data.

My initial question was more like which array to build, should i get separate controller etc...
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A lot of loose ends in that post. Compared to what two disc array on what controller in what kind of array, and what is being measured.

Bear in mind loading games usually are not long sequential transfers and involve a fair amount of seeking (something the raptors excel at), editing video or high res photos on the other hand...well you get my drift.
 
Val said:
I think that 6 HDDs in RAID 10 will be a lot faster then say 2 Raptors in 1 and 4 other HDDs in 10, no?
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For what? If you need to do sequential transfers, 6 disks will beat 4 any day, but for most things it's not dominated by STR. Look at StorageReview for more details on this.
Val said:
I dont understand why everyone advices to get a Raptor. Simple 2 disk array is faster and has 3 times more data.
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Because of seek times. 10k drives simply have lower average latency, and no raid can make up for that. If your workload does any swapping at all, you'll enjoy the improved read latencies of the Raptor.
 
RAID 10 (NOT RAID 0+1), properly configured gives excellent performance.... now if I only knew of a card that did RAID 10 well :)

If we're talking only about 4-6 drives, I wouldn't use RAID 10, but probably opt for the more ubiquitous RAID 5/6. I think you're mainly interested in read times... and those should perform quite well.

If we're talking about a 2 drive system, then the Raptor option is alright.

You won't feel too much difference in a larger raid between 7200, 10k or 15k drives.

Avoid bottlenecks by using controllers with separate channels to the drives (e.g. SATA or SAS), and if using a single card, then make sure it's PCIe. Otherwise try to avoid any bus contention/overlap if you end up with different cards.

If money is not an issue, I would get a 42 drive SAN with a 4Gbps fiber connection. :)

Did you say specifically what kind of performance levels you are looking for? 100M/sec? 200M/sec?... or will around 75M/sec do? 75M/sec is easily achieved on the cheap. Things get a bit pricier once you go past 100M/sec.
 
Its for my desktop system :) Just wanted some significant boost to peformance for loading times, copying etc. As well as more reliability.

I was hoping not to get a separate card since it probably wont fit if i put thermalright cooler on my gtx :D

I read review of ICH9R on tomshardware and it looks like it peforms exceptionally well in RAID0:

http://tomshardware.co.uk/2007/05/2...chipsets_with_fsb1333_and_ddr3_uk/page13.html

Around 300MB/s on both read and write is very good, right? :eek: Or am i missing something?

I was then thinking that RAID0 + external backup is the best way to go. If it is, should i go for two 1TB drives (or 750MB if they are not out) or maybe 4 good enterprise series WDs 500MB each?
 
Val said:
Around 300MB/s on both read and write is very good, right? :eek: Or am i missing something?
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Seek times. They're not listed at all, and they're a very important aspect of a storage system. But you don't seem to be reading the other posts in this thread, so buy what you want.
Val said:
I was then thinking that RAID0 + external backup is the best way to go. If it is, should i go for two 1TB drives (or 750MB if they are not out) or maybe 4 good enterprise series WDs 500MB each?
Click to expand...
I would suggest Raptors (in whatever capacity and raid level you feel like) over the 1TB drives. Their sequential transfers are a bit lower, but the seek times are much, much faster - twice as fast, in fact. Then throw in whatever large disks you feel like for storage, and some external drives as backup.
 
unhappy_mage said:
Seek times. They're not listed at all, and they're a very important aspect of a storage system. But you don't seem to be reading the other posts in this thread, so buy what you want.
Click to expand...

I read others posts alright. As i said i have yet to see raptor outpeform a RAID array.

Saing it has 4ms latency is all good, but how does it tranform to real life benefit? From what i have seen, it hardly matters at all. Certainly not enough to justify considerably slower read/write etc as well as outright space.

But im happy to change my opinion if you point me to a review where raptor shows clear benefit in reel-life tasks.
 
Val said:
I read others posts alright. As i said i have yet to see raptor outpeform a RAID array.
Click to expand...

You wanted fastest, I suggested RAPTORS in RAID 0.
You asked for opinions, that's what you got. Take them or leave them.

[/RANT]
 
Val said:
But im happy to change my opinion if you point me to a review where raptor shows clear benefit in reel-life tasks.
Click to expand...

MAU vs ADFD Raptor vs. GD Raptor vs. the fastest single-user 7200rpm drive in SR's performance DB

In the single-user tests, Raptor is between 13 and 24 percent faster than the T7K100.

I think that 6 HDDs in RAID 10 will be a lot faster then say 2 Raptors in 1 and 4 other HDDs in 10, no?
Click to expand...
Depends what you do. Video editing with a three disk R0 source and three disk R0 destination array is most likely faster than on a single, six disk R0 array. Intelligent distribution of read and write access can greatly improve performance: you can read George Ou's thoughts and tests w.r.t. this issue here.

I replaced the massive 20-drive 10K RAID10 array with 8 pairs of RAID1 consisting of 16 15K RPM drives. The new 15K RPM drives had roughly a 10% I/O performance advantage over the 10K RPM drives they were replacing, but there were 20% fewer of the newer drives — which meant that drive speed was more or less a wash. [...]
As a result of this change in RAID configuration, the queue depth (the number of outstanding I/O transactions backed up due to storage congestion) dropped a whopping 97%!
Click to expand...
 
drizzt81 said:
Depends what you do. Video editing with a three disk R0 source and three disk R0 destination array is most likely faster than on a single, six disk R0 array. Intelligent distribution of read and write access can greatly improve performance: you can read George Ou's thoughts and tests w.r.t. this issue here.
Click to expand...

He's talking about databases, not video editing or desktop performance. And I'm not sure his "fix" is anything more than coincidence. To quote the article: "I replaced the massive 20-drive 10K RAID10 array with 8 pairs of RAID1 consisting of 16 15K RPM drives.". Then performance went up. Well, what can I say... duh. Replace old 10k drives with new 15k drives, and you'd have to work some pretty strong black magic to get performance to be worse. The load got evenly distributed across the 8 raid 1 pairs... but he didn't mention any tests showing that the raid 10 array wasn't doing that. I'm not impressed ;)
 
I though about it for some time now, seen a lot more benchmarks, and i think raptor might actually be worth it.

Im planning on 2 raptors in raid0 and 2 seagates 750GB in 0 as well.

The only question i cant find the answer - will transfer from raptor array to seagates be fast as well?
 
Val said:
I though about it for some time now, seen a lot more benchmarks, and i think raptor might actually be worth it.

Im planning on 2 raptors in raid0 and 2 seagates 750GB in 0 as well.

The only question i cant find the answer - will transfer from raptor array to seagates be fast as well?
Click to expand...
Very much so.
 
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