Need a new HDD, Raptor or RAID?

JamesM

JamesM

JamesM

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Last time I brought a HDD was yonks ago and after having a quick read of this forum i'm undecided. Do I buy a single 76GB Raptor or RAID two 80GBs?

I am an avid gamer so spend a lot of time loading up games so load times are fairly important. I also do a spot of graphic design for websites, etc.

So basically the question is do I spend £105 on a Raptor or £65 on a RAID setup with two 80GBs?
 
i assume you will be doing the raid in speed form. therefore you will have 2 drives to go wrong either of wich would make you lose all ya data, compared to the 1 drive of the raptor. personlly i like *** raptors. and also its a lot easier to install one drive then a raid setup. or maybe im just lazy lol
 
raid 0 is faster but has more chance of breaking. depends how much space you have in your case as well. never had any drive bar maxtors break on me though but as long as you have a reqular backup for important information its not realy a worry.
 
I used to have my games installed on a RAID-0 array (2x250GB Hitachi S-ATA II) but now use a 150GB Raptor. If anything the Raptor 'feels' a little faster (maybe due to lower access time and 16MB cache). Of course if you want to win an HD-Tach benchmark war then RAID-0 is your man ;)
 
never gone raid, quick question. if i were to go raid 0 and one of the drives failed, would i lose data from both and ne unable to retrieve this.
 
never gone raid, quick question. if i were to go raid 0 and one of the drives failed, would i lose data from both and ne unable to retrieve this.
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Yes, in RAID0 but not RAID1.

I used to not care about HDD performance, but after wanting more speed I switched to a one of the early 36Gb 10Krpm Raptors which died in under 6 months. After that I thought i'd try a Raid0 setup with 2x80Gb Maxtors, which I have to say was amazingly fast, but that too died after 4-5 months. Now I'm using a 75Gb Raptor 10K which is supposed to be much more reliable than the earlier models (the RE come with 5 year warranties i believe)

I might go back to RAID0 setup, but I wouldn't do it again without having a 3rd non-raid HDD or stick to RAID1. You could try copy mode RAID1 which write speed is 1x while read is 1-2x which gives you the benefit of backup if one disk fails and read speed at the expense of capacity and write speed.
 
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I used to use one of the old Raptors (36gB), got it at the end of 2004 iirc, as my OS and program files drive. I used a Caviar 200gB for media. This was pretty fast, but then about half a year ago I bought myself a pair of 250gB Caviars and have been running them in RAID0 since. They seem much faster than the single Raptor for everything from load times (OS and games) to large file copying (not surprising). So in short I've found my RAID0 setup to be faster than the Raptor.

As for data security, I syncronise daily all my important data to the old 200gB Caviar so the whole drive failure thing isn't a major concern. Since I have no other use for the Raptor, I use it as a dedicated drive for my page file! (set to 4gB). Compensates for only having 512mB ram I guess :p

If you aren't concerned about data security (have backups?) then I would definately go for the RAID option.

Hope this helps, null :)
 
i tend to keep all my important files, photos, work, vids etc on dvd as backups and keep another copy of each with my girlfriend just incase of a fire or something disastrous! dont trust hd's too much with all my precious files so think i might go raid 0.
 
I've started running 2x 74Gb Raptor 16mb in RAID0 as my system drive and I must say it's very fast, also the new Raptors are more quiet than the old ones. I use a 3rd fast drive for ghost backups- takes about 4 minutes to do a full ghost image of my system (it's only around 20 Gig full yet out of 148Gb) but I will keep doing regular Ghost images (say every week) in case the RAID fails for some reason.

apart from that, i'm quite happy running in RAID0 and would recommend to anyone who wants some extra performance out of their system.
 
if you want the fastest loading times, definitely get 2 raptors in RAID0, i got that as a system/game drive and im always into games first :) got some other drives to keep stuff on, docs, music etc. for backup i got a hd that i just plug in, then keep in a drawer
 
Or go the whole hog and get four 36gb drives and run them in RAID10. Best of both worlds, speed and security...

Of course you'd have to buy a dedicated RAID controller ;)
 
Sadgeek said:
Of course you'd have to buy a dedicated RAID controller ;)
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Not necessarily, the current Intel and Nvidia motherboard SATA implementations support RAID10 natively. It does steal 4 SATA ports so if you want other storage drives then you'll need either a mobo with more than 4 ports (most of the modern ones) or an add in card.
 
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