best hard rives for RAID0 boot disks ?

[James Manns]

as per title,
im looking to buy some fairly low sized hdd's (about 80g) for a raid 0 setup for boot disks to lower boot times etc, without going ssd.
can anyone suggest the best disks for this ?

help is much appreciated

James

 

[hyperst]

I run a couple of Hitachi Deskstar drives, (80g) allways been good, had them a year and a half at least and they are virtualy silent as well, model HDS728080PLA380

 

[rumble291]

Get the fastest ones with the most cache, lowest read time etc.

Personally I've got 2 500GB Western Digital Blues 500GB in RAID0 and there bloody good really for what i paid for them!

Make sure they both identical aswell as it will help with performance. Another thing I hear RAID cards (PCI or PCIe) are the best to go for as there hardware RAID no software like motherboard RAID configs, will also improve speeds. Down side being the cards are very expensive and you might as well go SSD lol.

Just make sure you don't buy a cheap SSD as the performance won't be great (my RAID0 setup for £90 odd in benchmarks is better than the cheap OCZ SSDs!) Its tempting but not really worth it currently.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-023-WD&tool=3

Them drives are the same series as mine. Reviews suggest there pretty good. Quiet aswell even though they harmonise with each other! lol

 

[master811]

In this case, you'd be better off going a bit higher in size (and they won't really cost much more) as the larger drives will have a higher platter density, so you'll get better performance out of them.

i.e. for an extra £3-4 per drive you can easily get nearly 4 times the storage space, even if you don't intend to use it straight away. Just remember you can never have enough drive space

 

[jbloggs]

Another thing I hear RAID cards (PCI or PCIe) are the best to go for as there hardware RAID no software like motherboard RAID configs, will also improve speeds.

This is not actually the case...2 HDDs in RAID0 on the Intel ICHxR will give the same performance as the same 2 HDDs in RAID0 on a (true) hardware SATA RAID card...where the hardware SATA RAID card will give better performance (in improved writes) is when you are using RAID5/6, when the onboard processor (of the SATA RAID card) will carry out the parity calculations and not the cpu...

a raid 0 setup for boot disks to lower boot times

RAID0 will not decrease boot time, but will most probably increase it...

RAID0 will only give a worthwhile performance increase over a single HDD if you work with large (video) files (copying/moving etc) and/or regularly unzipping large archives...

If you still feel you want to RAID0 a couple of HDDs, then I would get 2 off These as they use a single 500GB platter...or just use one of them...

 

[James Manns]

so do you think a different raid set up would work better? if so which one ?
basically i need 1 or two for boots and 1 or two for general space( depending on what you think i should do).

thanks