3 x Raptor's in Raid 5 or 2x in Intel Matrix 1 and 0 or SCSI?

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Well the topic says it all,

I currently have a WD Raptor 74gig drive and it is fine, no complaints however being a glutton for punishment I want to improve load times on games.

The question I have is, do I spend about £300 for a Adaptic 68pin U320 SCSI card and buy a 73gig 15K rpm drive?

Or do I try raiding a couple of WD raptors?

I would like to keep my OS intact at all times because I get narked having to reinstall it. Thus I need some data protection. I thought about RAID 5 - i.e 3 WD raptors. This would probably cost about £300 as well.

3rd option is to try out intel's matrix storage tech and put 2 WD raptors, half of the drives in raid 1 (OS) and the other half in RAID 0.

I have a P5WDH deluxe which I belive can do RAID 5 on SATA. So the question is....

What would you go for and why?

Also I would like to hear from those who are running MATRIX or who have tried it. Intel eludes to the fact you can just add another drive and have it build the array while you are still using the computer. This sounds great as I can migrate my OS from 1 drive to a raid setup without a reinstallation. Is this possible?
 
I have heard about the seagates but I want fast access times as well as good transfer performance.

Basicly I want my cake and eat it!

I am prepared to have just a single SCSI drive if that proves to be the best option. Honestly I don't want to shell out for 3 x 15k drives as that will cost a bomb.

I am also limited to a 1xpcie slot for a SCSI controller/raid card. I had a SCSI drive in the past and it was only U160. At that time it was still ATA5 drives but it totally trounced ATA5 by miles. SATA is probably on par these days though.

it would be nice to see how a single SATA Raptor and SCSI drive compare.

Cave - is a rocketraid really going to be any better than the intel IC7R on my P5WDH
 
Yeah I have been looking around and was considering an LSI SAS card but my motherboard is gimped with it's lack of dual x16 pcie lanes.

My only solution is too hold off and change the board then go SAS or SATA or just go SATA now.

I still like the idea of picking up an Adaptec u320 HBA and just running a single 15K SCSI drive. The access time alone would be pretty impressive.

You'll have to let me know where to look for those cheap drives, because that is very good price.

I am still looking at SCSI controllers but so far adaptec are the only ones that make a pci 1x u320.

As for SATA I think only 3 ports are tied in to the IC7R so raid 5 is an option but that forces anything else on to the jmicron controller. Really I don't want to add another SATA controller when I have the IC7R. I doubt a Rocketraid would add anything performance wise unless I was going for 4+ drives and I don't see me doing that.

I am not looking for massive amounts of space either. I would be happy with the 100-200gb mark. I don't store data and I don't really download either. I tend to have the OS, office and 6 games installed at any one time. I like to keep my PC relatively clean and tidy.

I currently backup my drive to another one with Acronis so I kinda have that covered too. A raid 1 would be nice for the os and office with games being shunted on to a raid 0. Thus I figured best of both worlds and head raid 5. Having said that I then considered just a single SCSI drive as my past experience with it I was rather impressed but as mentioned it was back in the day when Ultra ATA 5 was the best you could get.

Has serial ATA really caught up that much?

My ideal solution would be a raid 5 array of 3 70gig 15k drives but my motherboard doesn't look like it can cope. So perhaps a single SCSI drive is the way to go.

Perhaps I can get hold of a second hand older U160 SCSI raid controller that is PCI. Too bottle necked??
 
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