Which is faster

[Pharacon]

Hello i'm building a box for my brother-in-law and i was wondering which would be faster for his HDD system. Did a little research and for the price we are looking to purchase i came up with 2 ideas.

1) One Raptor 78gig, 10k RPMs small drive space @ 173.90


2) 2x Diamond Max 250 gig @ raid 0 lots of space good performance, but with possible raid failure @ 119 bucks per disk thats 238 bucks all together

3) Kinda a crazy one but seems like a good idea to me, get a bunch of cheap stata drives and raid 5. Right now with this idea looks like a Hitachi 7k250 @ 54.33 apiece x4 on raid 5 total price 217.4 with about 214 gigs of space, should get near raid 0 with redundancy... Or just goto Raid 0 for max performace


This is a gaming box nothing really important on it so any ideas suggest crits?

 

[Deadlierchair]

Keep it simple, man.

RAID complicates things, adds cost if you want a good controller card, and sometimes doesn't even help in many applications.

You could save money and time by going with a modern 7200 rpm drive with 8 MB of cache like the Maxtor, Seagate, etc. These new 16 MB cache Maxtors seem to be all the rage and are still way cheap ($100 for 200 gigs) and are plenty fast for any gaming you will throw at them.

 

[rodsfree]

If you don't care about spending money and just want the speed.

Get a SCSI controller and single drive that will do U320. yes that's over twice as fast as a SATA drive.

The non-RAID controllers are reasonable, and a 70 or so gig drive will run about $150.

Just for gaming you don't need huge amounts of space. And you don't need the redundancy of a RAID-5 setup.

If you want to do RAID just for RAID's sake. 0 or 0+1 is considered the fastest way to go, with 1+0 being considered safer - but it's not implemented as often in the cheap controllers. The last 2 also require 4 drives min.

I personally have a pair of the 37gig Raptors in a RAID 0 array and I'm pretty happy with it.

 

[latief75]

i personally think my 74gb raptor was worth every penny!!!

just get another big- cheap drive for backup and your all set ....

raid is good, yet i don't think the technology is as mature as it should be ......

 

[pcnerdguy]

If you plan on overclocking raid isn't a good thing to do corrupted files and such.I have trouble overclocking with my scsi drive but I can overclock alot when running Ide.

 

[Deadlierchair]

i personally think my 74gb raptor was worth every penny!!!

just get another big- cheap drive for backup and your all set ....

raid is good, yet i don't think the technology is as mature as it should be ......

A year or so ago a lot of people were recommending this but since then other hard drives have gotten so fast that the lack of space and high price of the Raptors have made them, at least in my opinion, sort of a waste. Still, if you just have to have a Raptor for whatever reason, latief75's idea of a small 'fast' Raptor and then a large backup drive is a good plan.