• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

sata, to raid or not to raid?

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

WejRepus

Member
Joined
Apr 23, 2003
Location
Redwood City, CA
i am looking for advice on whether i should get one 73Gb raptor or 2 36's and either raid 0 or raid 1 them...
that is pretty much it, could you just help me on the pros and cons of each
 
please hlp me out, i have never used SATA or RAID before and am buying the components fro new system in a week or two
 
As far as I know, 2 36gb in raid 0 will be the same as 1 76gb but faster. So pros = speed , cons = price maybe and also that you use more connectors on your PSU and mobo. Thats all I can think of as far as cons. If i was in a position to choose between the 2 id go for 2 36gb in raid 0 for a faster setup.
 
jstutman said:
also note that the 36 gb raptors are not true sata

Does that really matter though?


To the original poster, I was in the same boat as you. I've chosen to go with the two 36gb's in raid for read/write speeds. With the single 74gb, you'll get a faster response time, and a quieter drive. You'll also have the possibility open for a future upgrade of another 74gber to put THAT in raid.

For me however, I think 2x36gb is enough space and enough speed. I don't want to spend the money on two 74gb's.

It's too bad they don't have the 2nd generation 36gb's out.
 
Jsmooth65 said:
What about a 36gb and a 74gb in RAID 0?


That'd be a REALLY waste of a money cause it'd just be two times as fast as the 36gb raptor. You'd be wasting half of the 74gb's space and the benefits of the 74gb too.

also:
a 74gb is $233
a 36gb is $120s

How much money are you willing to spend?
 
Go with 2 Hitachi SATA 80 gigs in raid, you will have the most benifits this way, good speed, 160 gig of storage, and low cost (about $150 for the two drives). The downside is they are slower than the raid configured raptors, but faster than a stand alone non-raid raptor. These are very quiet drives however they make thermal alinement/recalibration noise every 10 to 15 minutes that some say sounds like a cat's meow (I keep my rig in another room and have yet to hear the noise some report). Like I said this config seems to be a great balance and may be the best compromise out there for many.
 
Also, keep in mind that in Raid 0, if one drive fails, u lose the data on both drives if they are in Raid 0. Raid one THEORETICALY will have 2x reads, but in the realworld, raid 1 shows little to now benifit other than data redundancy.

If i were you, I would go witht eh 76GB raptor. This will give u blazingly fast speed, and the option to add another later down the road if u decide u need even more speed.
 
If I were you I'll go with RAID 0, since you have raptor hdd, which is faster and more expensive but less of capacity. Of course you should back up your data frequently to avoid 1 drive crash and lost all of your data. If you like to go with secure data protection then choose raid 1. I wont choose raptor with raid 1 because these are still lower capacity on the market now.

that's all my opinion. hope will help you.
 
Could you just buy 2 raptors and than have like 1 other 3rd cheap drive and have a Raid 5? This way you have all the benefits of Raid 0 plus the parity to rebuild any info from a failed drive. I think it should work fine.
 
The onboard controllers are limited to RAID 0 or 1 and normally have 2 channels. Even if you could, you'd be limited by the slowest specs on any drive. The size of the array would be 72GB, from the 2 raptors. With parity information split over all drives, seek and disk access latency would be limited by the "cheap" drive. Processor utilization would be high, since the onboard controllers rely on the CPU for parity/stripe calculations.

If you have a good backup solution, use it religiously and need high sustained transfer rates, then 2 36GB Raptors would be good(assuming that you are using onboard RAID controllers). If you do not regularly use large files with high STRs, then the 73GB Raptor will get you better responsiveness from the OS and most applications.
 
Back