Single SSD, Velociraptor or WD caviar raid 0?

[A-Dub]

I'm considering my options and I'm not sure which route to take. SSD's are looking pretty good, but the prices aren't low enough quite yet. My machine currently has 2x250gb WD cavair drives, if I set these up in a raid 0 how would they compare to a single SSD? How would a single velocirapor stack up against these two options?

SSD - fast but expensive
Velociraptor - cheaper than SSD
2x250gb raid 0 - cheapest option since I already have the drives

Which would you choose and why?

Another thing to consider is that I've never set up a raid before, how difficult is this? I'm running Windows 7, see sig for my system.

[Rider200]

Hi Zoini!

Well first off you have two drives so the Raid 0 would be the cheapest, most cost effctive, but not the most reliable.

You need to understand why RAID came about, back in the day RAID was primarly used for servers because - Drives were expensive, backup were slow, and Data was precious (still is BTW) and hard drives were unreliable - that is the MTBF (Mean Time Between Faiiure) was low, around 200,000 hours). So companys like Compaq, IBM, and others came up with a way to make a series of hard drive redundant, that is if one drive failed the data on all the drives could be safe and recoverable. The first two types of RAID were RAID 0 and RAID 5. RAID 5 was three or more drives in an array that had an encoded parity system that would say every 32, 64, or 128 bit would be a sum of the previous bits, with what is called stripping if one of the three drives failed and was replaced with a simular size drive or larger the data could be recoverd. It worked, relpaced many drive and recoverd the data.

RAID 0 is two same size drives that drive 1 is an exact mirror of drive 0, if one of the two drives fail then you break the mirror and your data is safe. Normally the RAID 0 is used for the System drive in a Server.

Now your question is about RAID 0, ok you have two 250 Gig drives that are exactly the same, so RAID 0 will work very well. The question is can you get another drive exactly the same as you have? If you can I would suggest you buy it and put it asside as a spare.

In a home computer or a workstation computer (not a server) for a business I think the money would be better spent in creating and maintaining a backup system.

Why would I say that? In my experance the newer hard drives MTBF is over 500,000 hours and SSD's is well over 1.5 Million hours. But your Power Supply and Motherboard are closer to 200,000 hours. I have seen many drives taken out by a power supply when they fail. And the highest failure rate for a manufacture is Dell. (A company I worked for had over 100,000 employees and had Dell, IBM, and HP computers almost equally between workstations and servers, more Dells went up in smoke than any other computer.)

Go for the SSD, make your self a decent backup system and backup on schedule.

MHO...

BTW - I have a server that is over 10 years old, the two storage drives are RAID 0, 500 Gig Maxtor SATA's. Backup on schedule...

[zbo]

RAID 0 is two same size drives that drive 1 is an exact mirror of drive 0, if one of the two drives fail then you break the mirror and your data is safe. Normally the RAID 0 is used for the System drive in a Server.


Thats RAID level 1. Raid 0 uses two disks together to get faster reads and writes, but it doubles the chance of failure. If one disk goes, the whole lot is gone.

RAID 1 is exatcly what Rider200 discribed.

Standard RAID levels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels)

[Aynjell]

Personally, I'd score a pair of caviar blacks, or 3 for that matter, if I was worried about cost but wanted speed. That way you'd get 3TB of storage, at good speeds. I personally am happy with my 2x300GB VR's...

Also there are some dell pulls for 80GB VR's that are darned quick too.

[Rider200]

Hi,

Zbo is correct, writing posts at 2:00 AM may not be a good idea for me anymore, I was talking about reducancy not speed.

If you really want speed then get an accellerator controler, then go RAID 0, most accellerators also has a battery backup in case power fails before the next write sequence.

My appologies for leading you astray!

:(

[Badbonji]

Raid 0 will most likely be quicker than one raptor on two drives if they are fairly modern with a good amount of cache (8mb+). I would just do this until SSD's become more affordable, or have raid 0 for storage, and get a decent SSD just for OS and most used applications, and you will gain most of the benefits of an SSD, whilst having space on the raid partition for extra storage.

[xtkxhom3r]

it all depends on what ssd you want to get...i would go for the ssd but i suggest you raid your 250's for now and see how you like the speed if you want /need more than that then start considering a ocz vertex or a mx25 ssd