Just got meself a bargin

davetherave2 · 6 May 2006 at 23:27

Well I have just got a fantastic bargin on a couple of 74GB WD Raptors.

A mate of mine was getting rid of them as he is downgrading his system so I know they are from agood home. I was expecting to pay around the £150 mark for the set but when he said £100 for them both I snapped them up straight away.

Now I can finially get round to setting up that raid 5 array with 3 raptors given that I already have one. Hope to do a couple of benchmarks to see what sort of performance I get out of these bad boys.

Just wondering if anyone else has setup a raid array with 3 of these and what sort of performance you have got. This will be setup as my os and main apps drive and hopefully will last me a good while before I need to start adding any more drives.

davetherave2 · 7 May 2006 at 19:15

well I have just setup my new raid 5 array with the 3 WD Raptors that I have and after a few headaches and ripping two machine to pieces to reinstall the system I have my first results. I am using the Silicon Images raid 5 controller on my Asus A8N-SLI Diluxe mobo so not really to sure how this compares to other onboard raid controllers but hopefully it does me well.

edit: this is with a stripe of 64kb the default it recommended.

davetherave2 · 8 May 2006 at 01:26

No he hasn't. I think the reason for the less than good performance is a mixture of the stripe size, the controller and the mode it has set the array in. Because I am using it in a legacy mode this seems to have an impact on performance. So I am going to change the boot drive to one of my spare 120 GB drives and then have this for an apps drive.

davetherave2 · 8 May 2006 at 01:30

Well scrap the above post. I have just installed the latest drivers and raid config program and it seems as though it has improve performance a lot. here is the latest test I did.

Now hopefully this is a bit more like it

davetherave2 · 8 May 2006 at 10:06

well the nvidia controller doesn't allow you to use raid 5 which was what I was hoping to use. I might just look at getting another raptor and then do something like raid 1 + 0 or have a 4 disk raid 0 array.

davetherave2 · 8 May 2006 at 21:03

well as I said I will give the raid 5 a go and if i don't see any noticable improvements then I will go for either a raid 0 with 4 drives or go for a raid 1 + 0 and see what sort of performance I get out of that.