Benefit of 2x HDD?

paul_31 · 25 Jul 2009 at 18:15

Hi guys,

Just putting a spec together for a new build which will mainly be running a couple of VMware/VirtualBox virtual machines. Unfortunately I cannot afford SSD as my primary disk but i wanted to know if I would see any performance gain from having 2x 500GB HDD instead of 1x 1TB HDD?

I was thinking of having my host OS installed on 1x 500GB drive along with other normal software and then using the second 500GB drive for the virtual machine disks. Would this improve performance?

I would assume this would be better as the VM's that are running can access drive 2 at the same time the host OS is accessing drive 1 - correct?

OR....would I be better off getting 2x HDD and putting them in Raid 0 then just partition to whatever logical drives I want?

Thanks,
Paul.

SpiderX · 25 Jul 2009 at 19:20

i reckon raid 0 then partition would be the best you can do

Major_Disaster · 25 Jul 2009 at 19:42

paul_31 said:
OR....would I be better off getting 2x HDD and putting them in Raid 0 then just partition to whatever logical drives I want?

This would offer best performance.

paul_31 · 25 Jul 2009 at 20:26

A couple further questions -

If I added a 3rd disk for redundancy, would raid 5 offer the same performance as raid 0?

If I do implement raid, would you recommend a hardware raid controller card (PCI-E)?

<EDIT>
This is the mobo I was going to go for if it's relevant -
Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P (Socket AM3)
</EDIT>

Venares · 25 Jul 2009 at 21:25

If your going RAID 5 you will defintaly need a hardware controler card.
On-board RAID just cant deal with the parity overheads of RAID 5, which will cause read/write times to crawl.
The PERC 5/i's seem to be the flavor of the month for cheep RAID.

paul_31 · 25 Jul 2009 at 22:40

Will raid 5 still offer better performance than a single drive or 2 stand alone drives?

samuria · 25 Jul 2009 at 23:27

I have 2 drives with virtual pc's on the seconds drive and it work fine windows xp vm loads in under 30 seconds. Once you have a vm running you tend not to use the o/s as much unless your running a vm as a server

miniyazz · 26 Jul 2009 at 10:30

raid5 with 3 drives will give you the same read performance as raid0 with 2 drives. write performance is likely to be around that of a single drive, with the PERC 5/i.

Mr-White · 26 Jul 2009 at 10:45

Implementing RAID 5 would cost you more than an SSD by the time you've bought 3 disks and a controller card.

MW

paul_31 · 26 Jul 2009 at 15:49

Mr-White said:
Implementing RAID 5 would cost you more than an SSD by the time you've bought 3 disks and a controller card.

Yeah, I realised that so think I will just be going for 2 disks and possibly raid 0 them without a dedicated controller card (or just stick with 1 disk for host OS and 2nd disk for VM's). I will just manually back up anything important to an external drive I already have and can always add an SSD or go for raid 5 when I get the budget to upgrade in the future.

Thanks guys.