Best small non raptor hdd.

snowdog · 23 Oct 2006 at 18:10

Hello,

My mate wants to raid his windows drive, to get better speed, he is using an old maxtor 40 gig now wich has terrible seek (20 ish ms) and poorish read.
So my question what is the fastest small hdd (not raptor, too expensive) with a good avrg read and good seek time for a raid 0 array for windows.
80 gb max , anything more is too expensive, prefferably 20 ish gigabytes per hdd.
It can be both sata and pata but my mate preferes sata.

Thanks in advance.

rpstewart · 23 Oct 2006 at 18:19

Hmm, this is going to be a tricky one. You certainly won't get a 20Gb SATA drive, in fact I don't think you'll get less than 80 without going for a Raptor.

In my opinion the best bang for buck option would probably be a single 200Gb Seagate 7200.10. It's as quick as a first generation Raptor and only £45 plus VAT & delivery, a pair of cheap 80Gb disks is going to be more than that and not a whole lot faster.

Minstadave · 23 Oct 2006 at 18:46

rpstewart said:
In my opinion the best bang for buck option would probably be a single 200Gb Seagate 7200.10. It's as quick as a first generation Raptor and only £45 plus VAT & delivery, a pair of cheap 80Gb disks is going to be more than that and not a whole lot faster.

Sounds like sensible advice, and RAID0 won't get you any better seek times, just better sustained reads.

snowdog · 23 Oct 2006 at 19:36

True, but raid doesnt increase seek ,and my mate also wants good avrage read...
Doesnt have to be sata, its just prefferable ( less stuff with cables etc.)
Anhow ill tell him to get a 200 gb seagate as he wanted to get a seagate anyhow ( he wants one extra disk for strorage and a small drive for windows ).
Ill just tell him to get 2 seagates otherwise, although im unsure if he has the money to do it right away, hes on a very small budget.

Im also interested for myself what would be the best 40 ish 20 ish cheap hdd, in terms of performance.

rpstewart · 23 Oct 2006 at 20:10

snowdog said:
Im also interested for myself what would be the best 40 ish 20 ish cheap hdd, in terms of performance.

Well our hosts only do two sub 80Gb IDE or SATA desktop drives - the 36 & 74 Gb Raptors and neither of those is particularly cheap.

You can get 80Gb for £25-30 depending on the manufacturer, they're all pretty much of a muchness in terms of performance but a fair bit behind the newer Seagates.

SkeeterUK · 24 Oct 2006 at 00:36

So it would be best to get 2 segate .10 drives and raid em to 0 using what strip for gaming and windows performance.

Can i partition the raid so i have one 40gb windows drive and say 2 others 1 for gaming and 1 for storage? I mean does partitioning raided drives impact performance or mess the raid in any way.

Also how would i go about cloning my 30gb drive (2 partitions 1 9gb 1 18gb) onto the raided drives into the 40gb partition?

Btw im snowdogs friend he mentioned.

I think im getting a segate 7200.10 either way, if i have enough ill get 2 for raid. I just wouldnt like it failing on me thats only worry with raided windows and games and downloads.

Btw is it worth getting segate 7200.10 drive or is there better drives coming out soon that will beat them segates?

--

Reason i talked to snowdog about small 20gb drives was that its only windows i wanted to raid (1 raid setup out of possible 2 raid setups on the computer) as a. thought be cheaper. and b. easier to recover if raid is ruined as only windows stuff would be busted compared to all my downloads and games and music and the likes.

As in a ideal thought. I would have 2 raids. (using either via or promise controller on the a8v deluxe rev 2 motherboard.

1. two tiny drives but performance like segate .10 drives say 2x 20gb for raid 0 for windows only.

2. two 250gb drives for backup and games. using 2 250gb segate .10 drives. In raid 0.

SkeeterUK · 24 Oct 2006 at 22:21

Any replies?

lay-z-boy · 25 Oct 2006 at 00:24

if your running intel google matrix raid.

if not

strip size of 32 or 64, depending on how big the cache files of the games you use are.

(32 will require more defragging for optimal speed)

have a single raid 0 array for everything and a single separate drive for backups etc.

thats what i do, i have a quad 80gig array in raid 0, this auto syncs my personal data to a 400gig backup & media drive.

snowdog · 25 Oct 2006 at 16:48

Am I correct i need :Intel® ICH8R, ICH8DH, ICH8DO
Intel® ICH7M-DH
Intel® ICH7M
chipsets for that ?

I have ICH7R not M

For matrix thing i mean.

lay-z-boy :

Hows performance like that, im interested in 4 hdd raid 0 too, will that many hdd affect avarage seek? What avarge read are you getting ?
Thx in advance.

The $6m Dan · 27 Oct 2006 at 12:41

The problem with raid is that it more than doubles the cost but not the performance.

A single 200GB Seagate with 8MB cache and perpendicular storage will cost less, give more space, be more reliable than raid, and produce less heat and noise, than 2 80GB drives.

I use two non-raid drives so that I can store all my data when I need to reinstall windows, but you can just as easily create a partition on a single drive and create two virtual drives. Whilst that does decrease performance slightly, it will still be a big improvement over his current drive.

snowdog · 28 Oct 2006 at 15:43

For smaller sizes : yes, but 2x250 is cheaper as 1x500 and a lot faster.
But indeed ill tell my mate (or he'll read it himself) to get a big baracudda 1st and *** to think more about the other thing.