Choice of 3 500GB Hard Drives in RAID 0

Garrett · 23 Nov 2006 at 11:40

Hi, I'm looking to purchase 2 500GB hard drives to run in a RAID 0 in my shuttle. I've got it down to a choice of the 3 drives below:

I'd appreciate some feedback from anybody who is running RAID 0 on any of these drives.

Setup will be:

- Shuttle ST61G4 - Booting Win XP Pro from a flash drive
- 2 * 500GB disk of choice in RAID 0
- The Shuttle only has SATA 150, no SATA II unfortunately, and I don't want to upgrade this box. [ED] I'll also be using the oboard Silicon Image controller, which isn't the best but I don't want to spend money on a hardware RAID controller either [/ED]

Bit of a weird setup I know, but I'm looking for the best performance I get get from very heavy simultaneous reads and writes to several hundreds of thousands of small text files, mostly running 24/7 - So this is the type of I/O I'm most interested in.

[ED] I also need lots of storage space, so smaller faster drives aren't an option [/ED]

The drives I'm choosing between are:

Samsung SpinPoint T HD501LJ

Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 5000KS

Seagate Barracuda ES 500GB

Any feedback or recomendations appreciated.

Uhtred · 23 Nov 2006 at 14:40

Humm it would be between the WD or the seagate for me. Not that i'd ever use two 500GB in RAID 0, that's just asking for trouble :/

Garrett · 23 Nov 2006 at 14:56

Zap said:
Humm it would be between the WD or the seagate for me. Not that i'd ever use two 500GB in RAID 0, that's just asking for trouble :/

Cheers, yes its a bit of a weird requirement I have, I need lots of space, but don't really care if I loose all of it as its easy to get all reloaded again.

I found a comparison which shows some interesting results if anybody else is interested. It looks like concurrent/multitasking read and write performance is a fair bit better on the Western Digital Caviar, only single drives tested of course, but interesting none the less.

I'm hosting the image, as the link had some competitor ads:

Reality Bites · 23 Nov 2006 at 15:10

Garrett said:
Cheers, yes its a bit of a weird requirement I have, I need lots of space, but don't really care if I loose all of it as its easy to get all reloaded again.

1TB of data which can be easily reloaded? :eek:

can't you for-go your floppy bay and have 2 smaller HDD's for windows and apps and then a storage disk?

For the money you're going to spend on two 500gb disks you could get 2x74gb raptors and a big storage disk.

Garrett · 23 Nov 2006 at 15:28

Reality Bites said:
1TB of data which can be easily reloaded?

can't you for-go your floppy bay and have 2 smaller HDD's for windows and apps and then a storage disk?

For the money you're going to spend on two 500gb disks you could get 2x74gb raptors and a big storage disk.

See, I said it was a bit of a weird requirement, but yes I can reload it fairly easily, it gets deleted/overwritten fairly frequently anyway.

I need the large storage area to be as fast as possible for my money, basically I have a disk bound operation which I need to speed up so that I spend less time waiting for it to finish.

No floppy drive bay on the shuttle, I might consider sneaking a laptop drive into the chasis, but I quite like the idea of booting off of the flash disk as the OS install and space required for other apps is very minimal.

The complicate things further, the average file size I am reading and writing is only about 30KB, so I need drives that can cope with a small stripe size nicely.

Reality Bites · 23 Nov 2006 at 16:36

looks like the 2x500gb raid0 solution is pretty much what you're limited to, though i would try and get another in there just for windows.

i do like the look of the WD 500gb disks. I'm considering one of these as a storage disk myself.

they look like they're built for abuse!

mosfet · 23 Nov 2006 at 17:56

WD 5000RE2 without a doubt. The only faster, large storage array would be 300GB SCSI 10k or 15k drives, which would cost several times more than the WDs.

I have a 5000RE2 and love it, wish I could afford another

Uhtred · 24 Nov 2006 at 08:23

correct me if i'm wrong but i thought the main beifit from raid 0 came from reading writing large files. I'm not sure how much gain you'd get from ~30k files.

Snapshot · 24 Nov 2006 at 08:50

Sounds like fragmentation might slow access down more than usual. If the files really are ~30KB it might be worth setting the allocation size to 32KB or 64KB when you format the disks.

Jonathan

Reality Bites · 24 Nov 2006 at 09:02

Zap said:
correct me if i'm wrong but i thought the main beifit from raid 0 came from reading writing large files. I'm not sure how much gain you'd get from ~30k files.

there have been many arguments over the years about stripe size etc and i'm sure there's some tables somewhere about the 'correct' stripe size for the kind of files you're mainly using.