RAID high speed HDDs, performance increase?

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SpiderWaffle

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 4, 2007
Messages
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I was thinking of setting a RAID array with two 74 GB raptors or something like that. Then putting my windows, games and programs on them.

How much of a performance increase would I see over two standard 7200rpm HDDs in RAID?
 
Never tried to SLI 2 hard drives. Then again I never tried to run 2 videocards in RAID 0+1 either.

Something tells me that I wouldn't see much performance increase in either case.

All joking aside though, I think you need to do a little more research about what you're trying to do.
 
Well I think your looking at about a 40% increase in I/Os per seconds. Does that seem right? I know for media rendering and stuff that would help a lot, but what kind of a performance increase would that translate into for normal games and programs?
 
Read up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

Realistically speaking all you gain in games is faster load times and all you gain in programs is... faster load times. Pretty much all you gain anywhere is faster load times since a faster drive just allows you to stick things into memory faster so you can work with them in whatever you are doing.
 
crashthenet44 said:
Never tried to SLI 2 hard drives. Then again I never tried to run 2 videocards in RAID 0+1 either.

Something tells me that I wouldn't see much performance increase in either case.

All joking aside though, I think you need to do a little more research about what you're trying to do.
Click to expand...

ROFL.

For desktop, single-user usage, Raptors in RAID0 won't show much improvement over regular 7200 drives.

http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101 (while this article is dated, it still holds true)
 
Haha, SLI some hard drives, that'd be sick! :eek: :D

Actually RAID0 is nice but does have drawbacks.

In my experience I have found my two Raptors to be much faster than a single 7200RPM drive with things like load times but other than that, there isn't a *huge* difference and for the money it wouldn't be worth it to most people.

Of course you could always RAID0 some nice 7200 RPM drives as well however your seek times would be pretty low with this method.
 
raid 0 is not really needed, for an os drive it would be fine, as you get double the space of a single drive.

i was under the impression that the modern 7200rpm drives were as fast as the raptors anyway?
 
SpiderWaffle said:
I was thinking of setting an SLI config with two 74 GB raptors or something like that. Then putting my windows, games and programs on them.

How much of a performance increase would I see over two standard 7200rpm HDDs in SLI?
Click to expand...

crashthenet44 said:
Never tried to SLI 2 hard drives. Then again I never tried to run 2 videocards in RAID 0+1 either.

Something tells me that I wouldn't see much performance increase in either case.

All joking aside though, I think you need to do a little more research about what you're trying to do.
Click to expand...

Umm, what? lol

I think some better English to use here is, "I want to use two drives in Raid, plus I want to run my video cards in SLI, what is my best option?"

In most cases, it is better to keep the drives separate.
 
ring.of.steel said:
raid 0 is not really needed, for an os drive it would be fine, as you get double the space of a single drive.

i was under the impression that the modern 7200rpm drives were as fast as the raptors anyway?
Click to expand...

As fast.. yes and no, Raptors have way better random access seek times but other than that, 7200RPM drives are as fast if not faster in throughput.
 
thebeephaha said:
As fast.. yes and no, Raptors have way better random access seek times but other than that, 7200RPM drives are as fast if not faster in throughput.
Click to expand...

Faster throughput in RAID0, sure... but like you said, not with access times.

Avg Transfer Rate, Access Time: HDD info, Price
78MB/s, 08.2ms: WD Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB, $160AR
65MB/s, 13.7ms: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS 320GB, $80
65MB/s, 13.2ms: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3300620AS 300GB, $60
52MB/s, 14.0ms: WD Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB, $70
112MB/s, 13.2ms: RAID0 'cuda's, 600GB total, $120 (ICH9R on P35-DS3R)

All measured with HDTune.
 
Ya I meant raid array, not SLI, lol, similar concepts though. So it sounds like for general use I'd rather have no raid and get faster seek times. So maybe getting one barracuda would be worth it, but how reliable are they?
 
I currently have almost a dozen of those .10 'cudas, and my oldest ones are about a year to a year and a half old. They've all been working great in my systems. My co-worker bought a couple at the same time I did a few months ago, and both of his died. The most likely culprit was the fact that his system wasn't plugged into his UPS, and his room A/C was constantly switching on/off throughout the day. Keep the drives cool and keep the power clean, and they should last a while.
 
They vary in quality from where they were made, general rule, the drives in Singapore are the best, tho I have two of those and two of the Chinese drives and both have been running fine for quite a while.
 
On second thought I'll stick with a western digital 7200 rpm drive(s), and maybe raid array. Reliability is just too important and raptors too expensive for what their worth.
 
SpiderWaffle said:
On second thought I'll stick with a western digital 7200 rpm drive(s), and maybe raid array. Reliability is just too important and raptors too expensive for what their worth.
Click to expand...

If you are going to use a Raid array with WD, use the RE drives so you reduce the potential of a dropped drive from the array. This was the only reason I went with Seagate instead of WD for my 2.2TB array as they are less affected than WD for that darn TLER bug.
 
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