Looking to pick best 2 drives for RAID on new setup

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Soldato
Joined
4 Sep 2005
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As I mentioned in another thread I am going to be building a brand new system from scratch and have got all the parts I need apart from the hard drives. I want to RAID my drives (as long as it is the best thing for performance) but am torn between 3 sets of drives.

The system will be:

Q6600 Go
EVGA 680i SLI
4GB Corsair Ram
BFG 8800 GTX OC2 768MB
BFG Ageia PhysX 128MB
O/S - Vista Ultimate x64

Now I was originally going to go with either 2 x Raptor X 150GB, 2 x Raptor 74GB and then started looking at the much larger capacity SATA II options and narrowed it down to either 2 x Western Digital RAID Edition 320GB SATA-II 16MB Cache or 2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA-II 16MB Cache.

Primarily into gaming, downloading and watching movies/tv eps. Might consider reducing the capacity of the drives as the thought of losing 640GB of data if the array collapses horrifies me.

Any suggestions on the best combo to suit the rig would be well received.

BA
 
Thank you for your reply.......I think. FYI I did you search.....extensively and this is how I came to the conclusion of the 3 drives in question. I was looking for a comparison and recommendations from the community and they would still be gratefully received. I have made a substantial outlay in setting up this system and really want to make sure I select the right drives.

BA
 
to be honest with tv, gaming and downloading, fast access times are fairly insignificant, so raptors are a waste of cash.

honestly , any two decent drives from current generation releases will be pretty decent and i really think you'd be fairly hard pushed to notice a massive difference between say 130-140mb/s and 160mb/s in general use. what i always find weird is game load times don't seem to improve that much from raid to non raid. i guess because its more than just load times, uncompressing data in cpu from memory after it gets there, doing some cpu work to generate a levels info and place items and set up AI info i guess. i'm not entirely sure. i mean, i guess if say a COH level took 1 min to load on a single drive, and a raid 0 of those drives is a 85% speed increase, you'd expect around 35second load time maybe, but in reality a lot of the time you'd see a 2 second decrease.

game loading tests are weird, does resolution change load times, because also graphics textures are being made on gpus, do the drives show bigger increases when less is loaded to gfx, or more is loaded to the gfx. i think game loading might be cpu based, or even just limited to the max speed of pci-e or something else.

downloading and unraring stuff raid gets a nice boost , bigger boost when everythings on the same drives.

i've been running raid always for the past 5 years, i've yet to have raid 0'd drives fail, at all, across probably 10 different setups, maybe more. theres a chance any drive might fail. you could run two separate drives, but theres nothing to gaurentee the drive that fails, is the one that happens to have the data you really needed on it. run raid, be happy, smack photo's, work/school files on dvd regularly.

I think i'm gonna upgrade my raid drives to the 7200.10 250gb's with the .11 platters in, in the next couple days from a couple 80gb hitachi's that are doing around 90mb/s sustained, the 7200.10/11's should get around 160ish sustained. i don't think the western digitals are anywhere near as good as people seem to say. i mean 500gb drive, £7-10 more than the 7200.10 for, in my experience exactly the same performance. i have 2 7200.10 320gb's that are over a year old that get 135gb sustained, which is almost identical to the slightly more expensive and possibly worse warranty WD's get.

they seem to be the latest buzz word on the forum, so the names everywhere and people are recommending them, but i can't see any proof they are noticeably better than cheaper drives at all.
 
Thanks a lot for the reply DM. I had read a little bit about the .11s too and have been looking out for them. Are they the Enterprise Class ones on O/C website?
 
The only 7200.11s which are available at the moment are the two 1Tb models (one is labelled as an ES.2). The 250Gb 7200.10 which HHM mentioned in the second post is in effect a .11 but for some reason Seagate have marketed it as a .10.
 
Thanks a lot for all the replies. Has been very helpful and will go for the 250s if that is the best option. Buying 2 x 1Tb models and raiding them to potentially lose it all.....nah I will give that a miss.

Thanks again

BA
 
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