Which would be faster?

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shroomiin

Gawd
Joined
Dec 23, 2008
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hey guys, i was going to upgrade my hard drive i am currently using a 36gb raptor. now i just have a few questions...

1 - if i got another 36gb raptor and put it in raid 0 with the one i have now, would i see any performance gains other than capacity? how would this raid array compete with other drives on the market now adays? would i be better off just picking up a wd black drive with the larger cache?

2 - im not sure if the raptor i have now is 8mb cache or 16, if i were to have an 8mb and a 16mb raptor running in raid 0 would that work fine? or would there be conflict because they are not identical drives? sorry probably a stupid question..

3. how much does cache really effect drive performance? does ti really matter or is it just marketing scheme?
 
and also, woukld the 2 drives have to be identical to stripe them? if i accidently had a 8mb cache version and a 16mb cache version could i still put them in raid 0?
 
Don't bother with those old raptors from the feedback I've seen on this forum (I admit, I've never owned one).

If you can swing it, grab the Velociraptor but I think the WD640aaks (or similar, can't remember the exact model name but I'm sure someone will chime in with it) is supposed to be great value and also very good performance, I believe better than the old 36gb raptors even though it has a slower rotational speed, the aerial density is increased, so this pretty much makes up for that apparently for the most part.
 
Canon said:
Don't bother with those old raptors from the feedback I've seen on this forum (I admit, I've never owned one).

If you can swing it, grab the Velociraptor but I think the WD640aaks (or similar, can't remember the exact model name but I'm sure someone will chime in with it) is supposed to be great value and also very good performance, I believe better than the old 36gb raptors even though it has a slower rotational speed, the aerial density is increased, so this pretty much makes up for that apparently for the most part.
Click to expand...

yeah but thats the thing. if i were made of cash i would have 2 velociraptors running in raid but im not. i already have one of these old raptors that i use for my os and it would be great if i could get a little more room for that. i could pick up another one of these drives for 30$, so i still want to know-

1 - if i got another 36gb raptor and put it in raid 0 with the one i have now, would i see any performance gains other than capacity? how would this raid array compete with other drives on the market now adays? would i be better off just picking up a wd black drive with the larger cache?

2 - im not sure if the raptor i have now is 8mb cache or 16, if i were to have an 8mb and a 16mb raptor running in raid 0 would that work fine? or would there be conflict because they are not identical drives? sorry probably a stupid question..

3. how much does cache really effect drive performance? does ti really matter or is it just marketing scheme?
 
IIRC Raid 0 doesnt give a big performance boost... Raid 1 is better for that... as for #2 I think you can run just about any set of drives in raid 0... I don't remember off the top of my head, but it seems like since it doesn't have to match striping (treating two drives as one contiguous) it shouldn't have a problem.

Cache IS important. especially at higher read speed. The cache is the portion that the drive's hardware has transferred into memory to then be shot through the bus to be processed by the OS. In other words, if your cache is full the hard drive has to stop reading for a second until it empties.

Honestly I've never liked raptors, too noisy and not much benefit. the WD640 is as fast or faster than the older raptors, its 600+GB, and it's quiet. I have one right now, and am thinking of picking up another as a backup drive.

They're only $70 at zipzoomfly, and should be around that price elsewhere. Great drive, great performance, and a much better $/GB
 
1) You'll see faster load times thats for sure. But you won't see any sort of FPS increases in games. But you'll be better off just getting a newer drive like the WD6400AAKS or the black version. Both of those drives would, at the very least, perform on par with RAID 0 36Gb Raptors. Though I think a single WD6400AAKS would outperform 36GB Raptor RAID 0.

2) A 8MB and 16MB Raptor will work fine I think. Never had to RAID 0 drives with mismatched cache size though.

3) Cache is important if you're doing a shit-ton of file transfers.
 
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