2 or 3 raptors?

arfur

arfur

arfur

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I thinking of getting rid of 2 of my maxtors and replacing them with either 2 or 3 raptors. I thinking of either 2 74Gb or 3 36GB's, for the extra 20 quid or so I could get an extra 36Gb and have the whole lot in RAID 0 :D

which leads me onto the next question.... does anyone know if the DS4 supports RAID 0 over more than 2 disks?
 
cheers,

Dont see why RAID 0 is dead, I work in the industry and I use RAID 0 on our HP servers when we need performance and the data isnt critical, some of the servers only have 2 HDD's so you dont have any choice...
 
ok, I've been looking around the net and people are saying that 2 barracuda's 7200.10's are pretty much the same speed as 2 raptors and cheaper, anyone got any opinions on this? I currently have 2 spinpoint 250's these are fast especially with vista :D but I want more speed loading games. my current drives get about 200Mb/s burst and 94Mb/s average in HDTACH....
 
from what I can see the Raptors are only SATA (150Mb/s) and the barra's are SATA2 (300Mb/s) so wouldnt the Barra's be faster anyway as long as the board supports SATA2 which my DS4 does.... I'd like to have raptors just so I can say I've got them, but I think the Barra's would be faster, also anyone got any comparisons with the spin points?
 
I think it might be the controller that is capable of 300Mb/s if there are enough drives to push it to that level (4 maybe...) so ... do I get 2 raptor 36's or 2 barra' 7200.10's? I already have a lot of storage so I'm not too bothered about only getting 36's as its speed I'm after....
 
I want the drives for my OS / loading BF2 onto and for compiling video on after editing, does that help with the decision?
 
ok its done, I've read loads of forums and came to the conclusion that the 7200.10s offer better storage per £ than the raptors (no surprise I know) but unless your moving loads of huge files theres no benefit of the raptors over the barra's, so i've ordered 3 of them for raid 0 (all my important stuff will be backed up to the other 2 raid array) so if the raid dies I will only loose the OS's... I'll post results when its done :)
 
I do have a spare controller card in my server, I think I'll put the disks in and use the existing OS install to test them as 1,2 and 3 disks and post the results... not sure though if the DS4 does 3 disk RAID 0... DS3 doesnt as the Intel controller doesnt support raid and the GB one only has 2 connectors.
 
ok,

the setup is -
E6400 (def)
DS4
BFG 8800GTS
2Gb GEIL 6400 (2x1gb)
Creative XFI Fatality
Coolermaster Stacker
Tagen 580w (which might be at its limit :) )
OS - XP Pro

and 3 segate barracuda's 7200.10's 16Mb cache in RAID 0

using HDtach I got the following results

1 disk - burst 214mb/s, avg 66mb/s
2 disks - burst 268mb/s avg 87mb/s
3 disks - burst 358Mb/s avg 101mb/s

thats sweet....

I'm currently now reinstalling XP and Vista onto the new array to test it out properly, but its looking good. Can anyone compare these disks to raptors? I'd be interested in how they perform considering they are only sub £70 for 320Gb.
 
strange... I wander if this could be the boards? I am using the Intel RAID control and my mate has a DS3 and he's using the Gigabyte RAID controller and both 2 disk results are pretty much the same.... oh and yes I have removed the jumper from the end of the disks....
 
ok, getting a little annoyed with it now, from what the last poster said I should be getting 130mb/s on 2 drives, but I have 3. I have installed the latest drivers and tested it on XP and vista and both give the same results, any ideas?
 
Kaiju said:
Burst means nothing mate and those average reads aren't looking too great.

You should expect around 130MB reads for 2x 7200.10 in RAID0.

hdtach.JPG
Click to expand...


Kaiju, what board are you using?
 
I didnt think the jumpers really made a difference to speed as the drives arent capable of reaching 150Mb/s anyway let alone 300...
 
just another update, I downloaded a Intel app from http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scr...All&OSFullName=All Operating Systems&lang=eng

and installed it, I right clicked on the array and noticed that writeback cache was disabled, I enabled it and my burst has now gone up to 1.1Gb/s and average is 125mb/s... it still doesnt seem right though as the disks never breach 140Mb/s, do you think it could be the controller dropping the speed down to 150Mb/s when RAID is enabled (AHCI is disabled automatically when RAID is enabled)?
 
ok, now i'm confused ans annoyed...I managed to screw up my mobo bios last night so I ended up getting a new board today, I got the Asus P5N32SLI-plus board which has got a Nvidia RAID controller. I have built up XP on the 3 disk RAID 0 array (3 barracuda 7200.10's) with the latest drivers but HD Tach still only shows 115Mb/s, I thought it could have been the Intel RAID controller on the Gigabyte but I dont think it was. Individually the drives get 65Mb/s each.
 
done this and some settings dont make any difference (forcing it to use 1g SATA or 2g SATA) and some make it worse like turning off the cache.

I noticed that when I forced it to 1G 1.5Gb/s the read score stayed the same but the burst went down so its like it cant read faster than 1G
 
yep, thats how I understand it but the 120Mb/s in RAID 0 is still a major problem, 2 disks should reach that (ish)...
 
i've tried 16k, 64k and 128k, its currently on 128k (nvidia optimal).

what would you expect to get out of these drives?
 
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