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Considering 2 Drives for RAID 0

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Femto

Member
Joined
Mar 8, 2006
Location
Oregon
Well, I'm running out of space on my 250GB SATAII in my sig, and the mix of data and applications and operating systems etc. is bogging down my performance. I also require more storage and more speed :D

I was considering these 2 Seagate Hard Drives for RAID 0 and was wondering if anyone has run these drives in RAID 0, and what feedback they have. I was looking at these two over the Western Digital equivalent, because of Perpendicular Recording and I wanted to try something different.

Thanks

EDIT: Irrelevant to this thread, but I'm also going to pick up a Chenming/Chieftec 901AD to give me more space to begin my watercooling setup.
 
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If you need extra storage and speed isn't important, consider building a small server with several large perp drives, also a small drive for the os :)

I have one in my sig it runs 24/7 dishing up mp3's and videos etc, and never causes any probs.
 
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Why spend $45 each on 80 gig drives ($0.56/GB)? Save up a little more and get a couple of 250GB drives, spend per GB ($0.32; 0.571 percent), get twice the cache (16mb) and 3.125 times the storage for only $70 more.

Also, if you're considering RAID 0 for your data, you'll want to have an aggressive backup plan in place, since if one drive goes, you'll lose everything.

If you're just looking at getting a separate drive/subsystem to power your OS and apps, you'll be better off saving up the extra $69 for a single Raptor 74GB, as the lower latency will make a much bigger impact than the higher throughput of a RAID 0 array and will be more reliable.
 
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hafa said:
Why spend $45 each on 80 gig drives ($0.56/GB)? Save up a little more and get a couple of 250GB drives, spend per GB ($0.32; 0.571 percent), get twice the cache (16mb) and 3.125 times the storage for only $70 more.

Also, if you're considering RAID 0 for your data, you'll want to have an aggressive backup plan in place, since if one drive goes, you'll lose everything.

If you're just looking at getting a separate drive/subsystem to power your OS and apps, you'll be better off saving up the extra $69 for a single Raptor 74GB, as the lower latency will make a much bigger impact than the higher throughput of a RAID 0 array and will be more reliable.

Thanks for the input, though I don't really need any more storage then 160gigs for apps, games, and the OS and I don't have "$70 more" (I wish :D). I was planning on having two of those drives or two WD1600YS 'RE' Drives. As for a backup plan, I have my WD 250GB SATA and then I have another computer with two 80gb ATA drives just for the purpose of storage and backups.

Ack, you've just made me confused. I could save up $70 more dollars, although I'm not sure if I would even use all of that space. I was just looking at drives in my budget range :confused:. Of course, I might use the extra 500 gigabytes...ohhoho *cries* I don't know what to do!

Raptors = Expensive; though fast
250GB Drives = Excessive + Expensive; though fast
80GB Drives = Not as expensive, somewhat speedy; though premium price.

I like these, because they offer more than enough space, have 16mb cache, great for RAID, and cheaper then the 250GB drives. Though for $20 more you get 150gb+ more space. But I'm not going to use all of that space, because I have another computer with dual 80GBs for the purpose. So, ~140gb storage on the network, +250GB for more backups/storage, and ~300GB of applications, games and other necessities.

Feedback?

Murdochs_mad said:
If you need extra storage and speed isn't important, consider building a small server with several large perp drives, also a small drive for the os :)

I have one in my sig it runs 24/7 dishing up mp3's and videos etc, and never causes any probs.

I have something like that, an old computer with dual 80gb drives, just not as fast, and it doesn't have SATA. Plus I don't have any cash for several perp. recording drives. Money money money. Stupid money. Ima kill money. -_-

Thanks for all of your input guys.

MORE: I have $200 right now, and the 2 Seagates and Case I mentioned above fits perfectly into my budget, so unless I get more cash, soon, then I'm probably just going to buy them. Besides, I have a ton of crap on this computer that needs to be backed-up onto the network, then have this 250GB drive formatted for storage once I get the RAID array. Then I'll have backups for the RAID array, and NAS.

I'm good.

NOW: Anyone have an answer to my original question? LOL
 
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2x80gb in Raid 0 = 80gb's.You will need to do raid 1 or something if you wanna have 160gb's of space im not sure about all the raids but i do know raid 0 is 2 drivers acting like one splitting info between them to help speed up trans etc.Or something to that effct
 
gigabit said:
2x80gb in Raid 0 = 80gb's.You will need to do raid 1 or something if you wanna have 160gb's of space im not sure about all the raids but i do know raid 0 is 2 drivers acting like one splitting info between them to help speed up trans etc.Or something to that effct

I assume that was typo right ? 2 X 80 GB in Raid 0 = 160 GB, its for performance and not secure since one drive failed, all data will be gone.

While 2 X 80 GB in Raid 1 = 80 GB, its just mirroring the drive for redundancy/secure.
 
Femto said:
I like these, because they offer more than enough space, have 16mb cache, great for RAID, and cheaper then the 250GB drives.

Feedback?

Sorry, Femto, I certainly did not wish to put you in a quandry ;)

The WD, at $0.40/GB is a good value. The performance difference between it and the Seagate in your application will likely be nill. The seagates have a bit better throughput, but not enough to really tell the difference. Were it me, I'd go for the WDs; you'll never know when you could use the space.

In terms of your original question, the 80gb 7200.1 Seagates should perform on a par with just about any other Seagate in the same series in a RAID 0 Array. I have 4 of the 250s in a RAID 10, and I'd imagine you should see similar performance with the 2 80s.
 
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I looked at a few articles. and wont try to say I know all of what some of you all know.

but from what I saw 90% of what the "average" person does(average being someone that uses their computer for everything, including heavy gaming) only modestly, if at all, benefits from raid 0. because of the setup, its skewed towards large linear reading and writing, IE large files. but does absolutely nothing to improve seek times.

so if you happen to be saving, recording, reading huge single files all the time(Im thinking multimedia type stuff?) than raid 0 all the way.

otherwise your risking failure for very little benefit. a raptor (or scsi if your rich) will do far far more for your performance.

I weighed raptor vs raid as well. raptor seemed to run even on large writes, and demolish raid for random seeks.
 
my bad.. the pinch for $$ drives were these (and I would recomend them for single user performance over WD's ;) )

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822145088

btw.. who doesn't render plenty of video then burn disks?
I know if my rig could, Id be doing it ALOT (and will be :D )
and our raptor load time sticky shows a 10% increase in game loading performance with Raid0, no matter what the OP concluded thats a SIGNIFIGANT gain with hard drive performance.. thats like going from 580 IO/second to 638 IO/second.. sorry you cant buy better single drives to get that kind of data rate boost the data rate isnt fast enough on the single drives.. good performing drives in Raid0 will stomp the better single drive.

my pimp Raid0 (matrix raid) will be with a pair of the 500gig Hatichi's ahhhhh yea :sn: :sn:

btw.. Raid0 with matrix raid does improve seeks :D
 
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Im sorry, but i was wondering why your recomending the HITACHI Deskstar 160GB,8MB drive over the WD 160GB,16MB drive for raid 0 or matrix? I was just going to buy 2 of the WD drives and put them in a matrix. But if the speed of the Deskstar is better....
 
Femto said:
I was considering these 2 Seagate Hard Drives for RAID 0 and was wondering if anyone has run these drives in RAID 0, and what feedback they have. I was looking at these two over the Western Digital equivalent, because of Perpendicular Recording and I wanted to try something different.

The 7200.9's aren't bad, but they're not perpendicular -- you'd need to go to 7200.10's for that. The 7200.10's have a bit higher density than this 7200.9 -- 114.4 vs. 103.8 Gb/in^2

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/sata/100402371a.pdf
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/sata/100417177a.pdf

Looks like a good price for a fast drive, but not in terms of capacity/$.
 
Madwand said:
The 7200.9's aren't bad, but they're not perpendicular -- you'd need to go to 7200.10's for that. The 7200.10's have a bit higher density than this 7200.9 -- 114.4 vs. 103.8 Gb/in^2

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/sata/100402371a.pdf
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/sata/100417177a.pdf

Looks like a good price for a fast drive, but not in terms of capacity/$.

Under the specifications tab, it says as one of its features is perpendicular recording :confused: which is why I picked those over the WD equivalent.

@ares350 - I do a lot of DVD ripping/compressing/burning, torrent seeding/downloading, playing games (WoW in a window FTW) whilst browsing the internet and listening to music at the same time, haha. Of course, the burning/ripping is circumstantial, depends when I have movies I need to backup or whatnot, but the result is the same. My trusty 3000+ is flaking under the weight, my hard drive is slowin' down and I'm running out of space. Although, Santa did bring me an Opteron 165 for Xmas :santa2:

That's basically my situation. If I got a Raptor (I have a crapload more space than just 74gigs) then it would exhaust my storage and would put me in debt, haha.

greenmaji said:
my bad.. the pinch for $$ drives were these (and I would recomend them for single user performance over WD's ;) )

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822145088

btw.. who doesn't render plenty of video then burn disks?
I know if my rig could, Id be doing it ALOT (and will be :D )
and our raptor load time sticky shows a 10% increase in game loading performance with Raid0, no matter what the OP concluded thats a SIGNIFIGANT gain with hard drive performance.. thats like going from 580 IO/second to 638 IO/second.. sorry you cant buy better single drives to get that kind of data rate boost the data rate isnt fast enough on the single drives.. good performing drives in Raid0 will stomp the better single drive.

my pimp Raid0 (matrix raid) will be with a pair of the 500gig Hatichi's ahhhhh yea :sn: :sn:

btw.. Raid0 with matrix raid does improve seeks :D

Thanks for the recommendations :) You've definitely convinced me to not even consider a Raptor, haha, well, not that I was going to get one anyway (way too expensive for what you get IMO). One 74gb raptor wouldn't fulfill the space requirements I don't think, although two 80g b or 160gb would probably be more than enough, anything more than that would destroy my budget.

Thanks for the input, greatly appreciated!

So based on all of the above information, do you think the Western Digital 'RE' 160GB SATA/16MB Cache Drives in RAID 0 would work well for me? or is there something else. Because anything more expensive than that ($65 each) is a no go.
 
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poopboypat said:
Im sorry, but i was wondering why your recomending the HITACHI Deskstar 160GB,8MB drive over the WD 160GB,16MB drive for raid 0 or matrix? I was just going to buy 2 of the WD drives and put them in a matrix. But if the speed of the Deskstar is better....

Hataichi's firmware is why I am recomending them even with less cache, take a look at storagereview.com for benchmarks from the two companies drives and see for yourself :)
 
having owned the hitachis and the perps, i can say the perps are better all around, really the only drives to buy right now.
 
Rattle said:
having owned the hitachis and the perps, i can say the perps are better all around, really the only drives to buy right now.

Please provide your single user performance data, TIA :)
 
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