Raid my Caviar Black or get a Velociraptor?

AxeMan

AxeMan

AxeMan

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Joined
20 Jan 2010
Posts
146
Hi All,

Just need to get the storage sorted now on my rig. Hers my specs at present;

i7 930 @ 4.2ghz
Noctua D14 cooler
Gigabyte X58a-UD3R Mobo
6GB PC12000 Corsair XMS DDR3
Sapphire 5970 2GB

[Storage]

Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB Sata3GB (Boot Disk + Apps)
OCZ Vertex2 60GB SSD (Games)

Now,

The question is, do I get another Caviar Black and RAID them, or go for a single Velociraptor for my main Boot/Apps drive?

I have a Vertex2 SSD that is great fun, but lacks the space for the OS and Apps i use, so i have left it as the 'games' drive.

Any thoughts would be appreciated,

AM
 
I'd buy 2 new WD Caviar Blacks as the one you have is a bit long in the tooth now and may not give you the best performance in RAID as the newer ones could. Stick those in RAID0 and use the SSD as the boot/main os drive.

Put applications and games on the RAID drive.
 
Id suggest looking at the seagate hybrid drives, they're supposed to offer SSD like performance and they're £100 for 500gb
 
LinktoInsanity said:
I'd buy 2 new WD Caviar Blacks as the one you have is a bit long in the tooth now and may not give you the best performance in RAID as the newer ones could. Stick those in RAID0 and use the SSD as the boot/main os drive.

Put applications and games on the RAID drive.
Click to expand...

Thast sounds good to me, Will have a look at the Sata6GB ones. Whats the difference between the Black and the Blue one?
 
teknokid said:
Id suggest looking at the seagate hybrid drives, they're supposed to offer SSD like performance and they're £100 for 500gb
Click to expand...

Jesus,

They look amazing. Looks like I'm 99% sold on one of these babies. Just need toi look at some reviews regarding performance and issues (if any)

Thanks for the heads up on these.

AM
 
AxeMan said:
Jesus,

They look amazing. Looks like I'm 99% sold on one of these babies. Just need toi look at some reviews regarding performance and issues (if any)

Thanks for the heads up on these.

AM
Click to expand...

Don't try raiding them - apparently they suffer from microstutter in windows if you do.

They certainly look good though - just dont forget a caddy to allow the 2.5" drive to fit a 3.5" slot.
 
AxeMan said:
That now leads to the question;

Go for Sata 6GB Raid0 or go with single Hybrid"?
Click to expand...

Remember SATA III 6GB/s is marketing stuff - mechanical hard drives don't need 6GB/s its only needed for SSD's.

How much would 2 Caviar blacks cost vs a 128GB SSD? would this be sufficient for your OS and apps?

If you are considering a motherboard update (not that you need one) the new Z68 chipset from intel will take a small SSD and a mechanical hard drive and merge them in windows, handling what should be on the SSD itself.
 
I'd have not recommended a Velociraptor - but at current prices they seem almost worth a punt (120 odd for 300gig)

I had the 150gig Raptor and it was very quick - faster (not benchmarks but in reality) than the 2xRAID 0 7200rpms I had

those hybrid drives don't have much cache do they ? so if playing games etc - surely not much can actually be cached (due to the size of current games) - therefore wouldn't be that great ?
 
I'd recommend the Velociraptor - the area the Caviars mainly lose out to the VR is in access times, and RAIDing them will not improve that.
 
i have 2 640gb 6gb/s 64mb cache blacks in raid 0 and i find them to be very snappy.hdtune reports access times at 7ms. i did actually have 2 160gb intel ssd's which i raided and also tried them on there own.i was not that impressed and have since sold them and gone back to the blacks.less hassle than the ssd's for now imo
 
If you don't want to shell out for a SSD, get the seagate momentus XT.

Velociraptors are obsolete IMO.
 
Having had a bit more time to review the hybrid, I am now leaning towards the HDD (Spinners) Raid0 option.

The Hybrids fill a niche. However, the Adaptive tech is still an uncertainty for me. I do lots of different things on my PC, not repetitive files or programs/apps, so i think the hybrid wouldnt work for me in that regard.

Now, back to conventional HDD's, I have read a few horror stories regarding the Caviar Black's in Raid. People are saying that the RE4's are better suited for it. Can anybody shed any light on this?

My 1 year old Caviar Black 500GB (WDC WD5001AALS-00L3B) is averaging 100mb/s tranfer speeds in AHCI.

What would I see in a Raid0 config? 150mb/s?

Also looking at just getting another 2 new drives (1TB+) and start fresh?
 
They seem v good for the price.

Wont need the 1tb 3rd drive. I'll use the Caviar Black for that?

What else is on the ' Good' list?

£100 budget
 
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