Raptor or 2 320gb 7200.10's Raid O for primary on ICH8R

eightballrj · Apr 11, 2007

Well, I have another 320 that will be here today and will be building the upgraded setup this weekend. I have a few HDD questions:

Should I run the Raided 7200.10's as primary or the Raptor? The Raptor is an older 74GB (8mb cache).

These will be my only drives in the system. Should I install games and programs on the Raptor or on the 7200.10's?

I will be either running the 320s in whole in Raid 0 or running the first 50gb of each drive in 0 and the remaining 270 in Raid 1. I will be backing up all media/important data to a server every night so the extra space of 0'd 320s would be nice.

Any input on ^ that one?

Thanks a bunch guys! I still have yet to read the Matrix Raid sticky and some howto's on it but I will get around to it before I do the build this weekend.

fabulouscoops · Apr 11, 2007

Tough choice, but I would lean towards the Raptor for OS and programs and still use the RAID 0:1 setup for the 7200.10's.

I don't think you would be giving up much either way.

tuskenraider · Apr 11, 2007

fabulouscoops said:
Tough choice, but I would lean towards the Raptor for OS and programs and still use the RAID 0:1 setup for the 7200.10's.

I don't think you would be giving up much either way.

Ditto.

eightballrj · Apr 11, 2007

Hmm, so no love for a RAID 0 array of perp drives over a Raptor? I would have figured that everyone would have said use the Raptor for OS and the perps for programs/games/storage.

bing · Apr 11, 2007

Yeah, agreed, tough choice !

But again, since those disk will be formatted, you could use some drive imaging tool like Acronis to save the installed OS and do comparison by restoring it to find if the single Raptor is better than tight Matrix Raid 0 slice (with equal size to Raptor) from the two 7200.10s. PCMark05 benchmark will be easy to spot on the difference, not low-level like HD-Tach.

eightballrj · Apr 11, 2007

bing said:
Yeah, agreed, tough choice !

But again, since those disk will be formatted, you could use some drive imaging tool like Acronis to save the installed OS and do comparison by restoring it to find if the single Raptor is better than tight Matrix Raid 0 slice (with equal size to Raptor) from the two 7200.10s. PCMark05 benchmark will be easy to spot on the difference, not low-level like HD-Tach.

QTF! I will definitely try it to see what the story is and post results.

nd4spdbh2 · Apr 11, 2007

very tough choice.... but if it were my hds i would do this... take the 2 320 gb hds, do a 60gb raid 0 drive at the beginning of each 320 (30 gb of each drive used) using amazing matrix raid, then u could either raid 0 or raid 1 for the rest, ur choice. but with that raid 0 at the beginning of each drive you will get way good performance.. we r talkin 160mbps standard trasnfer rates and like a 9.5ms reponce time.

bing · Apr 11, 2007

Thanks eightballrj, expecting your result here !

To be honest, if I was in this situation, my apps folder (Program Files) usually needs no more than 40 GB. I will surely do this :

2 X 7200.10 :
Raid 0 : 30 GB or even 20 GB, this for boot/OS drive, with 20GB it definately beats that old WD with it's 160 MB/s STR and with approx. 8.x ms or even 7.x ms access time. With 20GB size is more than enough even for Vista with 4 GB page file if required.
Raid 1 : Important stuffs

WD Raptor 75 GB :
This will be the whole application folder aka "Program Files" and other scratch pad folders like temporary and etc.

......and.....

I will install the 2nd "plain" OS for rescuing/SOS purpose that is bootable in that Raptor just in case of recovering that Raid 0 when trouble times come like one of the 7200.10 went kaput.

Anyway, you always can do selectable boot drive from BIOS though !

PS: Plain XP OS only needs about 500MB of space.

Another interesting thing is to finalize and find the best spot whether the page file is better in the fast Raid 0 or in the stand alone Raptor.

Good luck with your quest !

eightballrj · Apr 11, 2007

bing said:
Thanks eightballrj, expecting your result here !

To be honest, if I was in this situation, my apps folder (Program Files) usually needs no more than 40 GB. I will surely do this :

2 X 7200.10 :
Raid 0 : 30 GB or even 20 GB, this for boot/OS drive, with 20GB it definately beats that old WD with it's 160 MB/s STR and with approx. 8.x ms or even 7.x ms access time. With 20GB size is more than enough even for Vista with 4 GB page file if required.
Raid 1 : Important stuffs

WD Raptor 75 GB :
This will be the whole application folder aka "Program Files" and other scratch pad folders like temporary and etc.

......and.....

I will install the 2nd "plain" OS for rescuing/SOS purpose that is bootable in that Raptor just in case of recovering that Raid 0 when trouble times come like one of the 7200.10 went kaput. Anyway, you always can do selectable boot drive from BIOS though !
PS: Plain XP OS only needs about 500MB of space.

Another interesting thing is to finalize and find the best spot whether the page file is better in the fast Raid 0 or in the stand alone Raptor.

Good luck with your quest !

Hmm, thats an idea too. Hell, I might just install X64 xp on the "faster" of the two drive arrays until I can get a copy of x64 vista and then dual boot them. Then I would install ubuntu on the Raptor(linux sometimes doesn't play nice with Raid array's)(first 20 gb's) and call it a day.

bing · Apr 12, 2007

You're right, Intel left Linux out in the cold starting from ICH6R if I'm not mistaken, no more latest driver.

Evilsizer · Apr 12, 2007

yea many linux distro's get some kind of error with the new ich8r. irc there are i think 1 maybe 2 that work with ich8r's. i cant recall which ones though, sorry.

eightballrj · Apr 15, 2007

Results:

http://service.futuremark.com/orb/projectdetails.jsp?projectType=13&projectId=818052

Clean install + drivers, X64, no optimization, 128k stripe, first 50gb of each drive matrix raid, no overclocking

7192

http://service.futuremark.com/orb/projectdetails.jsp?projectType=13&projectId=816780

Same except on a 20gb partition on 8mb cache 74gb Raptor

7163

tuskenraider · Apr 15, 2007

So what's your thoughts on the two setups?

eightballrj · Apr 15, 2007

Well, just for the hell of it I am currently running the OS on the 100gb raid setup.

Raptor or 2 320gb 7200.10's Raid O for primary on ICH8R

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