2x Seagate Barracuda 320GB SataII in Raid 0?

sl4vik · Sep 12, 2006

I have the old 74gb 8mb raptor, and people are telling me that if I buy these 2 drives, and put them in raid 0, they will be much faster then if I kept my Raptor?

Can anyone confirm this? This will be on a Asus P5W-DH Motherboard with intel E6600.

Also can anyone point me to the direction of raid 0? I have no idea what it is and how to set it up on my PC.

Thanks for your help

I.M.O.G. · Sep 12, 2006

RAID

Your motherboard has a builtin RAID controller, which you will use to setup RAID 0. During startup, you can access your RAID 0 configuration tool by going through the BIOS most likely.

I'm not familiar with the drives performance to tell you if performance would be noticeably better for you. The random access performance would be best on the Raptor I believe, but you may find read and write performance noticeably better with RAID 0.

nd4spdbh2 · Sep 12, 2006

OH YA.. .it will but alot faster... with just straight raid 0 on the drives ur looking at 130MB/s average sequential... u section out the first 50-80gb of the raid 0 partition with intels matrix raid ur looking at 160MB/s average .... oh and btw i have the same exact setup as you... P5W and E6600 with 2 250gb seagate perpindicular drives.... with a raid 0 of 50gb i get 160MB/s Average 2300MB/s burst and 9ms response time.... then i have the rest as a storage raid 1...

and ps one raptor will do about 62MB/s average sequential compared to the 65-66MB/s that a single 250gb seagate will do.... GO WITH THE seagates FTW!!!!

Captain Helghas · Sep 12, 2006

Um... Raptors are faster in seek time, perpendicular drives are faster in sequental read speeds. It's apples to oranges.

sl4vik · Sep 12, 2006

Ok, but which will be faster for : loading maps, startup, installing?

Can I do the whole HDD in raid 0? Wouldnt that be the fastest then?

Captain Helghas · Sep 12, 2006

For gaming purposes, I would have to say the Raptors. Their 8.9ms seek time helps here.

For large files, such as loading 1080i movies, I would go with the perpendicular drives.

RAIDs are faster if you only use the inner bits of the platter, since there the actual velocity of the bits are greater than the outer bits. To get that kind of speed though you have to limit your space.

johan851 · Sep 12, 2006

One thing worth noting is that if you're using Matrix RAID and sectioning out the first 20GB or so of each drive your access times come down quite a bit. Into the 9ms range, which helps offset the loss of seek times when moving to 7200RPM drives.

jeffp83 · Sep 12, 2006

They will be faster in certain scenarios, but the Raptor will still have the better access time, so I think program load times would still be faster on that.

johan851 · Sep 12, 2006

I've been told by a couple of people that perpendicular drives in RAID 0 will be faster than first-generation Raptors in RAID 0. The performance is the other way around for the newest generation of Raptors, as they improve performance across the board by 20-25% over the older models.

nd4spdbh2 · Sep 12, 2006

johan851 said:
I've been told by a couple of people that perpendicular drives in RAID 0 will be faster than first-generation Raptors in RAID 0. The performance is the other way around for the newest generation of Raptors, as they improve performance across the board by 20-25% over the older models.

true newer raptors have better density than old ones.... BUT

a raptor has 8.9ms random access.... my seagate raid partition does 9.3ms random access..... now lets think.... i have more space i have spent less money i have literally the same performance if not better... they are cooler and quieter and have a 5 yr warrenty... oh and sata2 with TRUE NCQ not the raptors sata1 ncq.... seagate FTW

pluss my setup feels faster than my friends raptor raid 0 array.

oh and BTW my raid 0 on matrix raid is about 4mb/s faster than 2 new gen raptors on regular raid 0

johan851 · Sep 12, 2006

a raptor has 8.9ms random access.... my seagate raid partition does 9.3ms random access..... now lets think.... i have more space i have spent less money i have literally the same performance if not better... they are cooler and quieter and have a 5 yr warrenty... oh and sata2 with TRUE NCQ not the raptors sata1 ncq.... seagate FTW

We're not in disagreement here.

But if you're looking for pure performance, without concern for data storage space and price, two new generation Raptors (especially in Matrix RAID) will perform better than two Seagate 7200.10's in Matrix RAID. In Matrix RAID seek times from the Raptors drop down to that 6ms range.

It's the price and the space combined with very good performance (though not quite as good as new Raptors) that made me ditch all of my older hard drives, Raptor included, for four 7200.10 320GB's.

nd4spdbh2 · Sep 13, 2006

johan851 said:
We're not in disagreement here. But if you're looking for pure performance, without concern for data storage space and price, two new generation Raptors (especially in Matrix RAID) will perform better than two Seagate 7200.10's in Matrix RAID. In Matrix RAID seek times from the Raptors drop down to that 6ms range.

It's the price and the space combined with very good performance (though not quite as good as new Raptors) that made me ditch all of my older hard drives, Raptor included, for four 7200.10 320GB's.

4 320's WOWOWOWOOWOW that must be fast..... although not as fast as 4 250s becuase the density of the 250's are slightly higer than the 320's but not by much... still 4 320s ....mmmm speed!!!! althogh it would be nice if seagate took their SCSI drives... 15k rpm and made them in a sata 2 style WITH perpindicular technology.... that would be utlerly amazing. and you are right... 2 new raptor 150's would be at quite an advangage to 2 250or320gb seagate perpindicular drives BUT a single drive for 230.... 3 seagate 250gb's can be had for right about the same price... its all what you want... i went with the seagates cus i have always had good luck with them (becides the first gen sata seagates that were handmedowns from my uncle they can be weird at times) pluss performance is amazing for the cost

johan851 · Sep 13, 2006

although not as fast as 4 250s becuase the density of the 250's are slightly higer than the 320's but not by much

Yeah, they're pretty close. If you consider that the 320's have an extra platter and an extra write head, though, they should be indistinguishable in terms of performance.

nd4spdbh2 · Sep 13, 2006

johan851 said:
Yeah, they're pretty close. If you consider that the 320's have an extra platter and an extra write head, though, they should be indistinguishable in terms of performance.

true so true... literally they are all the same drive.... 250, 320, 500 gb drives are all the same... but the 750 is another animal... the arial density is easily 10-15% more than that of even the 500gb or 250gb drive. but i couldnt be any happier with my current setup..... my current setup se sig blow the ***** out of my old 3.0ghz northwood, 6600gt, 2 80gb 7200.7's in raid 0... i just need to get a good 40mm fan for the chipset on my p5w cus she gets a lil warm when running pasive.... i dont think the stock heapipe has a wick... thus the btx layout of my lian li case does not go well with it.

Rattle · Sep 13, 2006

johan851 said:
One thing worth noting is that if you're using Matrix RAID and sectioning out the first 20GB or so of each drive your access times come down quite a bit. Into the 9ms range, which helps offset the loss of seek times when moving to 7200RPM drives.

If you just make two 20gb partitions on each drive and raid 0 them does it automatically use the beginning of each to get those better seek times?

stupid question ?

would 40gb on each be much slower ?

Captain Helghas · Sep 13, 2006

As I understand it, since Win98, partitions on a HDD have been made by sequencial bits to sequencial partitions. So yes.

However, I've not seen the options of the Matrix yet. I'm actually amazed to see the results now.

johan851 · Sep 13, 2006

would 40gb on each be much slower ?

Slower. Not a lot slower, not inconsequential. Just slower. I think there are a couple examples of various-sized partitions in the 2x250GB RAID 0 thread.

Rattle · Sep 13, 2006

yeah I seen them, I guess I will have to experiment.

dominick32 · Sep 13, 2006

johan851 said:
I've been told by a couple of people that perpendicular drives in RAID 0 will be faster than first-generation Raptors in RAID 0. The performance is the other way around for the newest generation of Raptors, as they improve performance across the board by 20-25% over the older models.

This is definitely true. When dealing with 74 Gig Raptors, a lot of people tend to forget to specify that there is an older 74G 8mb Cache model and a new model with 16mb of cache and Raptor X technology. Everyone seems to overlook this.

After reading some of the previous posts in this thread, lets clarify a few things:

One single 74 gig Raptor (older 8mb model) = 65 MB/s sustained read 7.7ms access time.
One single 74 gig Raptor (brand new 16mb model) = 84 MB/s sustained read 7.7ms access time.

One single 7200.10 Seagate Perp = 66 MB/s sustained read 13.2ms access time.

I would say that is quite a substantial difference^^^^^^^^^^^

So the answer to some of the previous statements is both yes and no. A single perpendicular will perform slightly better than an older 8mb raptor. Raid 0 will produce very similar performance figures when using the Matrix compared to Perps.

However, when dealing with the newer revision raptor. In both sustained reads and random access time, the drive will perform significantly stronger both in a single drive configuration, and a Raid 0 setup VS. the perps.

Price to performance, I still say hands down that the perps are the winners. However, if you want maximum performance and money is not part of the equation, the Raptors will definitely shine over the perps.

Regards,

I.M.O.G. · Sep 14, 2006

dominick32 said:
This is definitely true. When dealing with 74 Gig Raptors, a lot of people tend to forget to specify that there is an older 74G 8mb Cache model and a new model with 16mb of cache and Raptor X technology. Everyone seems to overlook this.

After reading some of the previous posts in this thread, lets clarify a few things:

One single 74 gig Raptor (older 8mb model) = 65 MB/s sustained read 7.7ms access time.
One single 74 gig Raptor (brand new 16mb model) = 84 MB/s sustained read 7.7ms access time.

One single 7200.10 Seagate Perp = 66 MB/s sustained read 13.2ms access time.

I would say that is quite a substantial difference^^^^^^^^^^^

So the answer to some of the previous statements is both yes and no. A single perpendicular will perform slightly better than an older 8mb raptor. Raid 0 will produce very similar performance figures when using the Matrix compared to Perps.

However, when dealing with the newer revision raptor. In both sustained reads and random access time, the drive will perform significantly stronger both in a single drive configuration, and a Raid 0 setup VS. the perps.

Price to performance, I still say hands down that the perps are the winners. However, if you want maximum performance and money is not part of the equation, the Raptors will definitely shine over the perps.

Regards,

Nice post. Thanks for the info.

2x Seagate Barracuda 320GB SataII in Raid 0?

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