Single SATA II drive faster or slower than Two SATA I drives w/ RAID

[trey_w]

In a previous thread I discussed my upgrade plans for my current computer. Everything has been purchased except a new video card at this point.

I have a quick question regarding SATA hard drives. I have a pair of SATA I (250GB) drives from my current desktop. These are going to be reused in my new system until I can afford to go with SATA II for everything.

That being said I did manage to purchase a new SATA II 500GB drive for this upgrade.

My question to everyone is what will be faster? The single SATA II or the SATA I drives in RAID 0?

This system is being setup to do mostly video editing with some gaming mixed in. Therefore what would be the recommended setup for this system or does it matter?

I'm thinking about going with the SATA I drives RAID 0 for my C: partition and and the single SATA II drive as another logical drive. Then I would do most editing of data from the single SATA II drive. Is this logic correct?

Full system specs below:

Vista Ultimate (64bit instead of 32bit for future memory upgrade to 8GB)
SilverStone LC10M HTPC Case (existing)
SilverStone Zues 520watt Power Supply (existing)
ATI xt850PE PCIe Video Card (existing)
G Skill DDR2 1000 (PC8000) 2 x 2GB RAM 5-5-5-15 (new hardware)
2 x 250GB Maxtor SATA I HDD (RAID 0) (existing hardware)
500GB WD SATA II SE 16 HDD 7200 RPM (new hardware)
ABIT IP35 Pro Motherboard (new hardware)
Intel Q6600 Quad Core (new hardware)

 

[Bl00dFox]

SATA I drives in RAID 0 will be faster. SATA-II is not "faster". It simply increases the maximum theoretical bandwidth to 300Gbps, which is almost never achieved anyway.

 

[IAmMoen]

SATA I drives in RAID 0 will be faster. SATA-II is not "faster". It simply increases the maximum theoretical bandwidth to 300Gbps, which is almost never achieved anyway.

I am pretty sure it is 3 Gbps not 300....

But that is neither here nor there. To the OP: All raptors are still sata1. If they are so fast don't you think western digital would step up the interface if their awesomely fast drives are being limited solely by the interface? Of course they would. But they aren't being limited. Regardless the raid 0 will be faster. A raid 0 out of pata drives would be faster than a single sata2 drive (assuming same drives of course).

Oh and your plan for a raid 0 on the 2 sata1 drives and the 1 sata2 drive as another logical drive is good. I have heard that putting the page file on your second logical drive can increase performance (don't have a definitive answer on this. Maybe someone else can help on that). At the least though I would say to put your "My Documents" on the second drive (due to the increase chance of raid 0 failure) if you have all your irreplaceable pictures. Of course you should be backing all your stuff up anyways.....

 

[trey_w]

Well I went by the local Best Buy today and they had the WD HDD for 179.99. I couldn't believe it. It really made me think that I got a really good deal. Anyways I told the sales person about the price at Microcenter and I asked him to price match it, He said they would but there was no way the HDD was priced that low. Needless to say I purchased my second WD HDD for $89 at best buy due to the price match. Everyone in the place was jumping in on the deal. Now its time to test and bench mark everything. I'm still waiting on my 4 Gigs of memory to arrive.

 

[deathman20]

Yup really no benifit from having SATA I over SATA II unless, not totally sure on this, but if you run 2-3+ drives in RAID 0 or maybe RAID 1 where it should use up all the bandwidth from SATA I, where with 3-4 drives will likely saturate SATA II's bandwidth.

 

[tuskenraider]

Yup really no benifit from having SATA I over SATA II unless, not totally sure on this, but if you run 2-3+ drives in RAID 0 or maybe RAID 1 where it should use up all the bandwidth from SATA I, where with 3-4 drives will likely saturate SATA II's bandwidth.

Nope, because each drive has it's own 1.5Gb/s bandwidth there is no benefit. Though if Asus' EZ RAID, which shares bandwidth on two ports, isn't SATA 3.0Gb/s, it'd be saturated with two drives in RAID0 that could top 187.5MB/s STR.