Good cheap drives for Raid 0

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RogueTrip

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Well, it seems like everyone wants to point out that 2 modern 7200rpm drives are faster and cheaper than a single raptor (although the 150gb and 300gb look great) on newegg. If I wanted to move into a Raid 0 setup, I wouldn't want more then 2x 200-320gig drives for them, what are reliable yet cheap drives to do this with, My 7200.10 320gig perpindicular Seagate (would this be a good raid 0 drive) has been great in single drive use but would want 2 new drives since this has a year a use already on it. So what are some recommended drives, would going 2x 400 be better than 2x 320gig if it has 32mb cache instead of 16mb. I'm gonna keep the 320gig for storage and don't need super large drives especially in raid 0.

TIA!!!

EDIT: forgot price, was trying to stay around or under $150, although, I see 2 WD6401AALS for $84.99 each, dunno if these are good or not
 
Would the WD5001AALS be just as good as the WD6401AALS performance wise in Raid 0? The price and size seems a lil better since I won't use the full size of the drives.
 
IIRC, if you have two drives you can put TWO different raid arrays on those two drives. Put a RAID 0 boot array on it with just under 1/2 of the capacity, and then build a RAID 1 Array on the rest. Doing this would allow you to store an image of the RAID 0 (for example) which would survive the loss of one of the drives, since RAID 1 is just a mirror. Thus if one drive dies you can pretty much instantly get back up by switching to the surviving drive, other partition with the image.
 
RogueTrip said:
Would the WD5001AALS be just as good as the WD6401AALS performance wise in Raid 0? The price and size seems a lil better since I won't use the full size of the drives.
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The 640GB drives maximize platter density, i.e. both drives have 2 platters, however the 640GB drives make the most use on the physical space on the platter. If the WD6401AALS is out of your budget then look at the WD6400AAKS. You wont be disappointed. I've got 3 WD6400AAKS in RAID0. I created a small (~200GB) OS partition (as jcolby suggested), however I didn't RAID1 the rest. I just kept that in RAID0 as well as bulk workspace. The only warning I have is if you're going to install your OS on a RAID volume then it would be a good idea to have a backup solution. I'm going to play around with what jcolby suggested about the matrix RAID0 and 1 volumes, never thought about that before. I also have WHS that handles my backups though.
 
For the price that you can find them at, 2 x 640GB WD drives AAKS or AALS, doesn't really matter at this point, will be the best non-Velociraptor speeds you're going to get for a long time methinks. Short-stroke 'em for the system partition, use the rest of the space for general storage and have at it...
 
when you say short stroke em.. you mean 16k stripes, or 64k, but partition to say only 200 or 300 for c:\ ?

and whats the benfit of doing it that way as opposed to just using the entirity of both in the raid0?
 
Short stroke 'em meaning create a RAID 0 setup using only a small part at the beginning of the drives so you get the fastest possible performance. Given most physical hard drives will perform their best to about 20-25% into the capacity of the drive, if you took the first 125GB or so on each of 'em as the first partition you'd end up with ~250GB of incredibly fast space for the OS itself, then leave the rest of the drive(s) for general storage.

So by "short stroke" I mean you're just setting aside the fastest portion at the beginning of each drive for the purpose of putting the OS on it. If you do a HDTach or HDTune graph of those drives, you'll see they're fast as hell (or as fast as they can possibly be) up to about the 20-25% mark, then the graph/line will start a slow taper off and get slower as you get deeper into each drive. If you look at some of the test images in the Post your HDTune scores thread, you'll see what I'm talking about: they start high and fast, then it gradually tapers down, down, down as the performance suffers and gets worse.
 
Thanks for the info! was just getting ready to format 2 x 500 wdaaaks to replace my failed rapture raid 0! ill go 300 ( which was what the rapture raid was
 
I am in the process of reinstalling Vista to my HTPC due to a problem with the machine. I replaced my older (1st gen) SATA 1 drives with a pair of seagate 320 7200.10 drives which I had sitting around.

I created a 40g system RAID 1 and put the rest in a RAID 0. Remember that this is a HTPC so the RAID 0 will just be for recording / playing recorded stuff, not critical.

Setting up the two raid volumes required going into the BIOS raid stuff and setting them, no rocket science here. When I installed Vista I had to go find the RAID drivers which I had copied onto a USB stick.

She's installing now. the upshot is that i have a 40g Raid 1 system drive, and about 560 gigs RAID 0 for the video storage, all from a pair of 320 gig SATA II drives.
 
jcolby said:
I am in the process of reinstalling Vista to my HTPC due to a problem with the machine. I replaced my older (1st gen) SATA 1 drives with a pair of seagate 320 7200.10 drives which I had sitting around.

I created a 40g system RAID 1 and put the rest in a RAID 0. Remember that this is a HTPC so the RAID 0 will just be for recording / playing recorded stuff, not critical.

Setting up the two raid volumes required going into the BIOS raid stuff and setting them, no rocket science here. When I installed Vista I had to go find the RAID drivers which I had copied onto a USB stick.

She's installing now. the upshot is that i have a 40g Raid 1 system drive, and about 560 gigs RAID 0 for the video storage, all from a pair of 320 gig SATA II drives.
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Either you're confusing RAID 0 and RAID 1, or you're doing something that seems totally off the mark to me. Why would you put the striped/speed for storage, and the mirror on OS?:confused:
 
Quite simple actually. This is a Home Theater PC, not a gaming system. It loads Vista and pretty much just hangs out. I don't need blazing speed, in fact I need reliability so if a drive fails the PC can continue to operate. OTOH I need a large area for video storage of recorded TV shows. If ANY storage needs to be fast, it would be the video, but in fact I did not make it raid 0 for speed but in order to get a larger contiguous area for the video storage.

A small Raid 1 partition for the OS for reliability, a large Raid 0 partition for video storage for size.

Too many people in these forums have blinders on when it comes to the possible uses for computers and raid configurations. The world is not only about gaming!;)

In the end though I was just describing HOW to do it (get two different raid partitions on a pair of disks). If you want to use the combination in another manner that is up to you.
 
You don't need blazing fast storage for saving/playing video :) A laptop 4200 RPM hard-drive does just fine.

But I understand - whatever makes you happy! :)
 
Precisely, you don't need blazing fast storage for video (as I mentioned) but you do need LOTS OF SPACE. Guess what Raid 0 gives you...
 
jcolby said:
Precisely, you don't need blazing fast storage for video (as I mentioned) but you do need LOTS OF SPACE. Guess what Raid 0 gives you...
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um, no more space than un-RAIDed drives, less data security than any other RAID level, and arguably less than seperate drives?
 
Dr. kitteny berk said:
um, no more space than un-RAIDed drives, less data security than any other RAID level, and arguably less than separate drives?
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Uhhh... did you read my post?

You are right on all counts, but you are not looking at the big picture.

Raid 0 does TWO things!

1) It makes things faster. I don't care about that.
2) It takes two drives and turns them into one contiguous space. I care about that.

It also makes the storage less reliable, I don't care about that.

I use Raid 1 to get data security for my OS drive, and RAID 0 for the video storage because it creates one big contiguous space for storing the TV timeshift recording. That video storage is not critical, I do not need to guard it with my life.

If I lose the RAID 0 I just don't care, drop in another drive and rebuild. I do care that I can take the remaining parts (after creating my RAID 1 OS partition) of two different drives and turn them into one big drive, simply and easily.
 
Kil4Thril said:
Ah, I see what you're doing. A bit unorthodox, but the logic does make some sense.
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I was originally replying to someone who wanted to use a RAID 0 drive but didn't need all of that space. So I said to create a smaller RAID 0 array, then use the remaining to create a RAID 1 to backup the OS that they put on the RAID 0. That is the "normal" way most of the "speed freaks" would look at things (if they looked at RAID 1 at all), but as I said, every system is not a gaming system.

An HTPC needs exactly the opposite of a gaming system, secure OS partition and large video storage that, if it dies, doesn't really matter. Take the same two tools (RAID 0 and RAID 1) and use them backwards to achieve a very different but equally useful result.
 
If you are just looking to increase space why not use Windows ability to span a volume over multiple disks? You can create one partition to spread itself over as many dynamic disks as you want.

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1681&page=27

I've been a big fan of Western Digitals AAKS line of drives. Here's two WD2500AAKS in software RAID 0.

atto_raid0_2.png
 
And you can certainly do that if you have pieces and parts of drives left over at the time Windows Boots. Motherboard Raid 0 simply does the same thing at the next level down, below the operating system. The bottom line is if you are already using the motherboard raid 1 (I was, for the OS) why not use the motherboard RAID 0 for the remainder of the drive's space.

If you don't want to do that, or if you are using two dis-similar sized drives, then the software raid 0 (and I thought it was really drive spanning, not true raid 0) would work just fine.
 
Not to thread hijack, but what are the best <250GB SATA2 hard drive with which to impliment RAID 0? I don't want to spend much ... thanks in advance.
 
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