What is faster 2 WD 7200RPM 16MB cach 400GB in Raid 0 or 1 WD 10k 36GB HD?

Wizzard005

Hey all,

This is my first post. I have a simple question. I have a Very nice gaming Rig setup, but i also use it for work too. Here are my specs

Right now:

AMD 3500 AM2 @ 2.6Ghz
ASUS MB with nvidia 590 chipset
2GB DDR2
2 x eVAG 8800's GTS PCI 2 x 16x
Sounblaster Xtreme Music
5.1 Home Theature Reciver with Studio Monitors

I have atm 1 x 36GB Wester Digital 10k RPM HD, but just ordered 2 400GB WD 16MB cach HD's from Frys. I was thinking of raid 0 ing them, I know i have to se the sizes to 160GB...

Just wondering that is better, I dont like storing my data on the same drive, so if i ever have a crash I am sol......

Judas

hmm...

i'd definitely lean towards the raid 0 of the 2 7200rpm 16mb drives (and it's probably be similare price value)

But it ALL DEPENDS on the raid controller, and frankly, i'm not very impressed with nvidia's raid controllers, hell thier IDE/sata controllers are quite terrible IMO

temeteus82

I think that those two hard dirves in RAID 0 are faster...

CDsDontBurn

the RAID 0, hands down.

i've got two 7200RPM 80Gb 8Mb Cache Seagates in RAID 0, and they outperform my single 36Gb raptor .

Judas

well faster in terms of overall performance..

but i doubt any raid configuration will touch the 10,000 rpm low latency speeds of the raptor.

I just have found that the nvidia raid controller perform quite poorly, sometimes as bad as being rather unreliable at times.

CDsDontBurn

well, i was referring to the data transfer bandwith, not latency timing. my raptor still does outperform my RAID set up there, yes.

Wizzard005

I wasnt going to use the nvidia Raid, MB also has the Silicon Image 3132 Raid 0, 1,


I am useing the ASUS M2N32-SLI


What is Raid 0+1?

I would like to store all of my data on these two drives, not really worried about HD failure because I backup very often to a NAS, just want to get teh most out of these drives and the 36GB raptor is kinda small now a days.

Judas

Well the silicon image controllers seem to performance quite nicely, a few people have had a few issues with the drivers, but if you do a little searching around, you can find out what works and what doesn't, and silicon appears to be releasing quite a few driver revisions quite frequently.

But all the onboard silicon image controllers have usually only had one port internally and one externally (usually subbed eSata). You probably have 2 internal ones then hey?

RAID 0+1 is for speed and fault talorance.

Basically you have (i've seen this work) either 3 hardrives, 2 with a combined size that would = the size of the 3rd. So you get the performance of the 2 hd's in raid 0 while maintaining stability and reliability by having the 3rd mirror the total of the 2 others. But i find this not as fast as raid 0 by itself (obvious).

A well, if i were to go with fault tolerance at all, i'd go Raid 5.

temeteus82

RAID 10 need 4x identical drives ...

H3X4D3C1M4L

For fault tolerance and speed, RAID-5 is simply unbeatable. 0+1 is just a waste, you get more space out of the RAID-5 setup and better recoverability I think.

The RAID-0 would be faster than the Raptor and also more spacious. I mean so what the access latency is lower, unless you're running server applications and you tried them on the RAID one then yes maybe the Rap would be faster but even still who really does that on a home computer?

Wizzard005

Well,

I have my two drives installed and running in Raid 0 . But i have a question, I decided to use teh nvidia controller and its working well, no errors just I did the following:

2 x 400GB disks = Raid 0 = Stripped

Now in windows it says I have 800GB of diskspace? I though when you stripe two drives it would only be 400GB usable?

Again, in the nvidia raid it says I have Raid 0 Stripped.. My roommate who has a Dell XPS did raid 0 too and he has 2 x 36GB drives , now he has 86GB of space on the c drive...

Am i missing something here?

Lelisevis

Raid in games

Loading times for Farcry

Two Raptors in Raid 0 load time 40.6 secs
One Raptor on it's lonesome 39.7

If two raptors at 10,000k are slower loading a game then one raptor, two 7200k drives are going to stand no chance.

Raid makes no difference at all in a gaming environment. At most fractions of a second.

Wizzard005

Not sure about that game listed above, but i notice a big difference in WoW and windows system load time / install time on apps.

Its way faster, way i mean windows used to take 25secs to load, now it flashes the windows screen and then boom into windows , maybe 20secs flat from turning on the PC...

H3X4D3C1M4L

1. Striping is putting them together so data is striped so you get the drive capacties added together for space, mirroring is the halving of space between two drives.
2. How do you multiply 36 by 2 and get 84? I think you mean 72 (which is ~68 when converted to base 2 gigabytes)