SSD drives are the way to go if money is of no object I know, I do not want to spend too much. Anyone have anything to say about Samsung SpinPoint F1 750GB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (HD753LJ)?
Thanks
I have two of these in raid 0 and although the sequential read and write times are very quick, the access and random write times are not but the same is true for any normal hard drive. They are one of the fastest normal hard drives and exceptional good value for money.
This is where Velociraptor drives and ssd drives come into their own and speeds up the operating system and game loading times for more than two sumsungs in raid can. Access times actually get slower when you raid two normal drives together due to the extra overheads.
Don;t be led astray by high read/write sequential speeds. There are some 330Gb WD drives whose name eludes me for the moment especially designed for raid 0 giving far superior performance than samsung drives in raid with much lower access times and these are a good compromise.
So in order of speed we have:
Intel SSD drives - the king of random writes, excellent for operating systems
Other SSD drives - still a good boost over normal hard drives with 0.1/0.2ms access times
Velociraptor - Very fast drives with a reasonable access time of about 4.5ms to 7ms
WD raid drives - Good access times of 11 or 12ms under raid 0 and fantastic read/write speeds
Samsung 1tb or 750gb drives - pretty good sequential read/writes especially in raid 0 but the access time can drop to 14 or 15ms so excellent if reading and writing large files such as movies.
Personally in an ideal world and a good moeny compromise (it would be nice just to have loads of ssd drives but who can afford that?) I would have the following as a rig.
1 or 2 Intel ssd drives for the operating system
Velociraptor (or 2 in raid) for the games
Samsungs in raid (or not) for movies, music, pictures etc.
