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Should I RAID 0 this, or..?

C

CaineX

n00b
Joined
Aug 26, 2004
Messages
48
I'm building a computer, for gaming mostly, but since I'm not a hardcore crazy guy, and I'd like it not to be too loud, I'm planning on getting 2 160GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA Drives with NCQ... however, as I know very little about building computers, I was wondering if this was a good choice, and if I should put these two in RAID 0 formation. If I could know the plusses and minuses of this setup, or other possible options, that would be great.

(see post 4)
 
Gaming does not gain much if anything from Raid-0 setups. This has been shown time and time again using many different games for testing. Some games actually take longer to load up on a Raid-0 array than a single drive. I would recommend you get a single larger drive if you really need 320gb of space or get a single faster drive like a Raptor 74gb drive and a larger 7200rpm drive for extra storage. As far as noise goes a single, larger drive will be quieter than 2 smaller ones.
 
I don't know who came up with RAID0, but I pretty much think it's always a bad idea (well, unless you're making something like a static information server with really old slow drives).

Basically, you're quite literally doubling your chances of losing ALL of your data. Now, if you're very confident of your backups, maybe that's not a bad thing. But personally I'd never use it.
 
Yeah, originally I was planning on just using the two drives normally. I was worried that if I used a raptor and a larger drive then it would increase the heat and noise significantly, is that correct?

So should I just use the two drives seperately without RAID like I planned to before? How much extra heat and noise would the raptor and a larger drive make, considering I'm probably going to use a Lian-li PC-7B Plus or a Antec SLK3000B...

EDIT: Especially considering the 100 dollar price increase of one of those Raptors compared to a Barracuda (what's with all the animal names anyways?)... is it worth it really, how much performance increase would it give? Eh.. well, I'll wait to see what you all say.
 
The Raptor will be at best 20% faster. Most of the time, it will only be 10-15% faster than the latest crop of 7200RPM drives. Have you considered the 16MB Maxtors? They are actually as fast or faster than the 36GB Raptors and at or near the top in 7200RPM performance, routinely trading the top spot with Hitachi 7K400, depending on the particular benchmark, and 7K400 is much more expensive per GB.

The heat of Raptor, while meriting concern, is easily mitigated. If you have a fan, even just an 80mm, in the front of your case, they'll be fine. They use FDB motors, so they may actually run cooler than some older 7200RPM drives with conventional ceramic bearing motors. The FDB motors also keep rotational noise down, although seek noises will be quite audible. It is VERY difficult to make a <5ms seek quiet.

The storage package I recommend to my customers is a Raptor and Hitachi 7K250 for storage. The Seagates are fine drives as well. The last one I built had two Raptors and a 160GB Hitachi. That is fast.

The Raptor does cost 4 times as much per GB as a conventional consumer drive, and it is nowhere near 4 times as fast - on a good day, it's 1/4 as fast. But it is still the fastest thing going on SATA, and picking up one of them is probably worthwhile. If you need more than 73GB of high speed storage, you need to look to the 16MB buffer Maxtors.
 
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