Need to Stream 95MB/s to HDD

[grandmaster]

Hi there,

I'm currently running an Asus P5WDG2 WS Pro which has Intel and Marvell onboard RAID controllers, two PCI-X slots and PCIe x16 and x8 slots.

I'm looking to use an application that requires heavy hard disk usage - up to 95 megabytes per second, though around 60 megabytes per second would be closer to the average.

Can any one recommend a potential solution?

 

[naro]

WD5000AAKS and Seagate 7200.11 should average around 65MB/s for reads.

So, the safest for you to get around 95MB/s would be to use 2 x 7200rpm hdds in Raid 0.

If your wallet allows, you can use 2 x Raptors which will have faster seek times if the application you use requires it.

The most important factor is the budget that you have in mind.

 

[longblock454]

The most important question, what kind of data is it? Inserting SQL statements that fast would probably take RAM based hardware!!

I'm guessing this is a media player of some sort?

 

[Nenu]

I note that you said "Stream 95MB/s to HDD" which means you need 95MB/s write speeds.

A RAID array will be able to handle the task as long as the RAID controller doesnt present a bottleneck.
You will need to review which controllers perform writes best and how many drives you need in the array to hit your target write speed.
RAID 0 is fine if you can afford to lose the Data should 1 drive fail or corrupt.
If you cannot afford to lose the data, a more robust solution will be required like RAID 5 but there is usually a small performance hit going to RAID 5 so you may need another drive in the array to boost the speed.

No doubt if you are capturing that much data you will be needing a lot of storage space so the smaller Raptor drives are out of the question.
The WD5000AAKS drives (500GB) are damn fast and incredibly cheap, I just bought one.
Even faster is the Hitachi 1TB drive model HDS721010KLA330.

 

[unhappy_mage]

The most important question, what kind of data is it?

QFT. If all you're doing is media capture, a simple raid-0 or 0+1 will suffice. If your application is doing 95 MB/s of random I/O... heaven help your budget