Raid 0 vs 10000rpm drives

MooMoo444 · 15 Aug 2008 at 13:39

Sorry if its a stupid question, I'm a noob really when it comes to hard drives.. just wondering which has the better performance + reliablilty.

Obviously in an ideal world, raid 0 with 10000rpm drives would be best, but thats a bit to pricey for me so I was wondering which of the two is better

clocka · 15 Aug 2008 at 13:43

depends what you are using them for. Seek times wont improve for normal drives so raptors will still has faster seek, normal drives when raided will be theoretically faster but raid0 is mainly faster for reading files like when installing windows, its literally twice as fast for that, a lot of things there is 0% difference tho.

best harddrives to get are:

Samsung F1 320GB
Western Digital 640GB
Western Digital 320GB/250GB RE3
Velociraptor 74GB/150GB/300GB

If raiding get the RE3 drives, if not buy a 320gb f1. If you want a faster drive get a velociraptor. Get the 640GB wd is you need more storage.

MooMoo444 · 15 Aug 2008 at 13:51

I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 at the moment - is that not very good then? You didnt mention it ;o

clocka · 15 Aug 2008 at 13:59

no, they arent as good as these drives, its alright tho. all the above drives use fast 320gb platters, except the velociraptor which is faster with a 10krpm drive. If your drive is the 320GB/1TB 7200.11 then it will be NEARLY as fast as those above but not quite AS good, not many reviews out for them either unfortunately.

cliffy · 15 Aug 2008 at 14:00

I hated my 7200.111 320GB drives. Brought to RMA'd one of the 3 timesand then the other one failed to so RMA'd that. Got my 2 samsung F1 today so looking forward to trying those.

Stonedofmoo · 15 Aug 2008 at 14:02

The Seagate 7200.11 are good too, especially the 320gig model, but none of the above are in the same league as the VRaptors.

Cheers

jbloggs · 15 Aug 2008 at 14:16

You might find This review helpful....

Stonedofmoo · 15 Aug 2008 at 14:52

Yep pretty much confirms what is always said. VRaptor is the best if money is no object
However don't put too much faith in those synthetic benchmarks

These are real world benchmarks using realworld software. As you can see the VRaptors are streets aheads in reality.

http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&devID_1=366&devID_2=361&devID_3=348&devCnt=4

clocka · 15 Aug 2008 at 15:31

the velociraptors are indeed faster in everything, the 320gb's review doesnt have the 320gb re3 tho which would be probably fastest after the velociraptor.

juno_first · 17 Aug 2008 at 19:05

The RAID bug got me years ago & Ive adding to the array since.
Im at 4x 80gig 7200 hitachi drives, which can still be had today, so I may just pop in 2 more & have 6 drives

Lets just say copying larges files accross the drive at 90mb/sec is cool & extracting a 4.3gig rar takes seconds

clocka · 17 Aug 2008 at 21:20

lol, juno, sell those 4 drives and get a single 320gb f1, you will get 95mb/s use less power, less noise etc.

helmutcheese · 17 Aug 2008 at 21:29

Thats some old slow raid above if 90MB/Sec (yes its MB not mb for HDD's).

A single WD RE3 will do 90+MB/sec single and a single 300GB VRaptor (newest firmware) about 109MB/Sec, the 150GB as single platter should be faster and all are faster at SEEKING than any 7.2K HDD's.

Obv all speeds vary from set up to set up.

juno_first · 18 Aug 2008 at 16:37

I can burn a dvd at 16x, copy files over network at 10mb/sec, extract a large rar & do general small file copying all at the same time & still maintain the burn at 16x.
So a new 320gb f1 can do all that & more than my 4x 80gig 7200 drives ?
Maybe I should bench my array, just to see how fast or slow it is lol.

Stonedofmoo · 18 Aug 2008 at 16:40

80gig drives will be much slower. Unfortunately I couldn't find the Hitachi drives for direct comparison, but heres the Samsung F1 Vs a Samsung 80gig drive

http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&numDrives=1&devID_0=361&devID_1=347&devCnt=2

The 320gig F1's are faster too...

MoRT489 · 18 Aug 2008 at 16:48

does the 640GB F1 use 320GB platters?

Stonedofmoo · 18 Aug 2008 at 16:50

creed said:
does the 640GB F1 use 320GB platters?

Yep

juno_first · 18 Aug 2008 at 17:35

Is there a drive benchmarker that someone with a new fast drive could use & me get off the net to compare?
I do know my drives are 9.4ms seek with I think 8mb cache. I had to edit the BIOS in 2 of them to get working in sata2.

ta

clocka · 18 Aug 2008 at 18:05

there is hdtach and hdtune, look on google for them.

juno_first · 18 Aug 2008 at 20:00

Okay, I ran those 2 programs in vista32.
How do my old drives compare to these new f1 320GB, as maybe I need upgrade?
I used a 128kb setting on HDTune as my array uses 128kb blocks.
HD-Tach was with the long 32mb test.
thanks

I thought my seek time was faster, though a couple of the drives are 3 years old or maybe being on RAID0 affects this?
I've used RAID0 on 3 different motherboards now & although sometimes its been a pain for the Windows install to find, I've always thought bunging another cheap/old drive on RAID0 was the best option?

clocka · 18 Aug 2008 at 20:05

thats pretty quick, your averages are 142 and 158mb/s, a single samsung f1 320gb is around 95mb/s, 2 of them in raid0 would be around 165mb/s ish. The seek time is about the same as the samsung f1's. However the Western Digital 250/320GB RE3 drives get 97mb/s and in raid0 get 195mb/s which would be quite a bit faster than your 4 current drives.

If you want better speed i'd sell your 4 * 80gb drives and get 2 * 250GB Western Digital RE3 drives, they are around £40-45 ish each. Their seek is about 11.7ms compared to your 13ms too. Some tasks dont see improvement with raid0 so you would have 97mb/s then compared to your likely 60mb/s of a single of your 80gb drives so in all aspects 2 of these drives will be faster than your 4 current drives.