raptor vs raid sata 2

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runLoganrun

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are two 75G sata 2 drives in raid0 going to be faster than one 150G raptor? the raptor is 10k, but it's only sata 1.

Thanks,
rlr
 
The tradeoff with RAID 0 is that it is generally usually faster than a single drive. In your instance I'd be on the line just as you are.

If I were to go more one way than the other, I'd go with the RAID 0 configuration. You have to remember that if you have a drive failure, your data is pretty much gone.
 
Im interested in this question also. I need to make a decision tonight so I can order the drives. 1 raptor and not having to deal with the hassle of raid??? I want to know simply which is faster??
 
RAID 0 with 2 74GB raptors would beat a single 150GB Raptor, but you are doubling your chance of losing all your data.

The SATA 1 vs SATA 2 argument has no merit at this point. there is no advantage with SATA 2 at all. Hard drives simply can't transfer data fast enough to take up all of the SATA 1 bandwidth.
 
Why 150Gb Raptor is considered faster than 74GB one..? They have the same spec and pretty much the same price.
 
sondo2121 said:
You have to remember that if you have a drive failure, your data is pretty much gone.
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I keep seeing this, but if you have 1 drive and have a drive failure, your data is still gone. No offense, I'm just being master of the obvious. ;)

To answer the question, on small files the raptor which has a faster seek time would be faster. For transferring large files the RAID would win. Which do you do more of? If you work with small files go raptor, otherwise go RAID.
 
xxEIEIOxx said:
I keep seeing this, but if you have 1 drive and have a drive failure, your data is still gone. No offense, I'm just being master of the obvious. ;)
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But if each drive has a 10% failure rate, the chance of losing all your data using one drive is 10%. With RAID 0 it's 20%, as you only need either one of the drives to fail to loase all your data.
 
Unless you have a good RAID controller why bother... you have to play too many games to set up RAID, not to mention the heat and energy use of the drives. I'd just plop a Raptor in there and be happy... even if the RAID setup is 15% faster, you won't notice it. I've done it both ways, and for anything short of real-time video capture use I don't see the point in RAID 0.

Anyway, go for the best of both worlds and get two raptors. :)
 
Im not worried about data loss. It will all be backed up anyways. This will be my main drive not really a storage drive. Got 2TB's of that else where. Hmmm I dont know whether I do more small files or big files. Mostly the drive will be used for video gaming and windows. Also backing up my dvd's and sending them to my storage drives.
 
dgingeri said:
RAID 0 with 2 74GB raptors would beat a single 150GB Raptor, but you are doubling your chance of losing all your data.

The SATA 1 vs SATA 2 argument has no merit at this point. there is no advantage with SATA 2 at all. Hard drives simply can't transfer data fast enough to take up all of the SATA 1 bandwidth.
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Yes and anyone who puts real data (non-recoverable or duplicatable) on a raid 0 is a moron.

Everyone should have raid 1 for anything remotely important, if you cant have that then just 1 drive would be next but to put real data on a raid 0 would be like driving drunk with no seatbelt.
 
The advantage of Sata 2 is you can chain a boatload of them together as well on one channel and they can share all the bandwidth!!
 
Elijah said:
Yes and anyone who puts real data (non-recoverable or duplicatable) on a raid 0 is a moron.

Everyone should have raid 1 for anything remotely important, if you cant have that then just 1 drive would be next but to put real data on a raid 0 would be like driving drunk with no seatbelt.
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It's just an OS drive, storage is elsewhere
 
xxEIEIOxx said:
I keep seeing this, but if you have 1 drive and have a drive failure, your data is still gone. No offense, I'm just being master of the obvious. ;)

To answer the question, on small files the raptor which has a faster seek time would be faster. For transferring large files the RAID would win. Which do you do more of? If you work with small files go raptor, otherwise go RAID.
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It's for gaming, general windows, burning cd/dvd, photoshop.
thanks,
rlr
 
runLoganrun said:
It's for gaming, general windows, burning cd/dvd, photoshop.
thanks,
rlr
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Good deal! If it were me I would try and get a SSD from Mtron or Samsung in a small capacity soon.

You can get a 150 GB raptor for now but swap it with a Mtron SSD when you can!
 
JDAdams said:
But if each drive has a 10% failure rate, the chance of losing all your data using one drive is 10%. With RAID 0 it's 20%, as you only need either one of the drives to fail to loase all your data.
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However, if you run proper backups, it really doesn't matter. If you have RAID 0 and you run a regular backup, if one of those drives fail, you still have a working drive to get back up and running immediately, where with one drive you are out of luck until you buy another drive. I just hate to see people scared off of running RAID 0 because they think they are going to have a guaranteed total unrecoverable loss of all of their data. You run that risk with any setup hat is not properly backed up. I have an array that has been running since 2002 without issue. It really does give a nice speed boost if set up properly. I am currently running RAID 0 on my laptop, and would not give it up for the hope that my chance of failure may be less if I pull a drive. Defective drives have a 100% failure rate, the rest have none. We just don't get to know which ones those are. ;) If you feel it is too risky, don't do it, but either way, don't run anything without a good backup.
 
I'd go with one 150GB Raptor and not bother with the RAID if I were you.
 
JDAdams said:
But if each drive has a 10% failure rate, the chance of losing all your data using one drive is 10%. With RAID 0 it's 20%, as you only need either one of the drives to fail to loase all your data.
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Someone failed probability class. 1-((1-.1)*(1-.1)) = 19% (it's really close in this example, but depending on the numbers, the difference can be much bigger)
 
I've had both hard drive failures and RAID controller hiccups happen when running RAID 0. It's a pain to deal with.

Here are a few rules:

1. Backup a RAID 0 array regularly, and/or store your data on another non-RAID 0 drive (of course with it's own backup solution).
2. Your RAID 0 array will fail at the least convenient time.
3. You may get good benchmarks with RAID 0, but real-world you'll stuggle to feel a 10% difference.
4. A single Raptor is more responsive than two in RAID 0 (or any like drives).
5. RAID 5 is a great alternative if you go with a hardware controller ($).
6. If you run RAID 0 and want your data back with a controller failure then use GetDataBack and RAID Reconstructor from http://www.runtime.org/ . You may not recover everything, but you'll get close to all of it back with this software.
 
For the record, and the OP, RAID 5 still will not save you from a controller failure. The general feeling is that on-motherboard RAID5 controllers are less robust than dedicated add-in cards.
 
[LYL]Homer;1032097390 said:
For the record, and the OP, RAID 5 still will not save you from a controller failure. The general feeling is that on-motherboard RAID5 controllers are less robust than dedicated add-in cards.
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Yes they are. It comes down to features but also comes down to overall performance. A dedicated hardware solution will perform better, but unfortunately it will cost quite a bit more for that little performance increase provided by the higher end hardware solution.
 
runLoganrun said:
the raptor is 10k, but it's only sata 1
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39614406gv1.jpg
 
I'm skeptical about there being tangible benefits for RAID in a single-user environment; the theoretical benchmarks look great and it scales much better when you hammer the disk with simultaneous requests, but that's what servers deal with, and it's entirely unlike a single-user load. Single-user benchmarks don't give RAID much of an advantage at all, if any (they can slow boot time, for example).
 
Which is why I point out that it depends on your application. In my work, I throw around very large data sets. It's easy to notice the benefit I get from RAID.

RAID1 and RAID5 also provide clear benefits to desktop users -- just not in the area of performance.
 
A lot depends on the controller for RAID. RAID 5 on a good controller will likely give the best performance, at a price. I've read that RAID 1 can be faster at reads than RAID 0, since the first drive to find the data provides it, and the other drive can go after the next request. With RAID 0 the drives must be slaved together since every cluster is split between them, and they need to read and write the same data at the same time. So, RAID 1 can improve access time over a single drive, from what I recall. That still does not compete with Raptors access time though.

Also, adding more than three drives to a RAID tends to saturate your controller channel. Either IDE, SATA1 or the PCI bus. So make sure your have a PCI express link for your controller. Integrated motherboard RAID controllers don't always have that even, at least not last I looked.

I may be a single user, and I don't know about how you guys use your PC's, but I'm always running several things at once anyway. Not just open apps mind you, torrents, music, video encoding, DVD ripping, and even gaming all at once. Not to mention Firefox's 12 tabs, email, proxies, remote clients, Widgets, financial software, virus resident, and so on and so forth. Sometimes, my HD is quite busy, but mostly I do tasks on separate drives, and separate CPU cores. Yesterday, I was installing software using Java, uninstalling Java, and updating Java all at the same time. Isn't that "multiuser" access? I only use RAID for fault tolerance. It gets too expensive and is too much hassle for too little benefit for me otherwise. I just use Raptors, got four of them in different PC's. RAID is for servers, set them up and forget about them.

Also, it is easier to get a $200 drive, than several cheeper drives and a RAID controller. I've already maxed my MB SATA connections, and I've only got space for two more hard drives in my Antec P180 case. I'd have to replace them all, and build a RAID 5. While that sounds nice, it isn't in my personal budget. Too much outlay of cash at once.
 
Why not RAID 1? You get fault tolerance and you get faster read speeds. You -do- get slower write speeds, but it's pretty likely that you spend a much larger amount of time reading than you do writing.
 
I’ve run raid 0 with 2 WD 36gig raptors and did notice a speed difference especially when extracting large files or doing any intensive task like video/audio encoding.While the system was a AMD Barton 2500+ OC @3.2ghz with 1 gig of ram It was definitely faster. If you are the kind of person who likes to multi task it felt a little snappier also while I did run real world test there was about a 50% improvement on some tasks which did end up making me feel like I saved time. Amazing how fast you can get xp up on running installed to a raid 0 setup so I'd say go for it or 2 larger Segate drives in the .11 series in raid 0.
 
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