Quad RAID 0 notebook hdd's?

Hades

Hades

Hades

Man of Honour
Joined
19 Oct 2002
Posts
29,994
Location
Surrey
I'm almost on the verge of getting a couple of single platter 320gb hdd's and using RAID 0 for speed. I've considered SSD but the cost and capacity isn't right for me yet. I will move to those in a year or two.

Then I started thinking... A 4 drive RAID 0 array would be incredibly quick, probably giving SSD's a close run. But the downside would be heat, power and noise.

Then I started thinking again... What about using 4 notebook 7200rpm drives such as the WD Scorpio's or Samsung HM121HJ? These should be much quieter than desktop drives, generate less heat, and use less power. Yet they should still be blisteringly quick in a 4 drive RAID 0 array.

This would be at a total cost of around £140 for a total space of 640gb. At this price it is clearly more expensive than desktop drives but significantly cheaper than an SSD setup with anywhere near as much capacity.

Any thoughts or experience on this? I could always backup to a slower and cheap 1TB drive to mitigate increased risk of a 4 drive array.
 
I dunno about the WD blacks, but both the seagate 7200.12 and samsung F1s are very fast in RAID0, silent as makes no difference and run pretty cool... not sure about power useage tho.

My seagate 7200.12 raid5 with 3 discs shows 35C, my samsung F1 RAID0 26C but I'm not sure how accuracte the samsung temps are as I've seen them as low as 8-9C before.

While transfer rates on the seagates is well into SSD territory (on an intel controller can hit well into 400+MB/s), the seek times are not even close and you can tell teh difference.

My brother has a 6 disc WD Green array and its none too quiet even tho its low power usage and AAM opptomised for quiet and I suspect laptop HDDs would similiar be much more prone to clicks on access.
 
Last edited:
what you using your system for

get 2 WD black or 2 samsung F1 drives, get 1 TB drives and partition it to 300GB for C: so get the best speed of the disks, unless your burning with 3-4 burners in the same system or doing video editing with big files or messing with big files, more then 2 disks in raid 0 is will give you little benefit under norm use

also no HDD setup can not match an SSD (just one for the most part) its not the data rate that completely makes the system responsive its the access times and IOPS that does
 
My machine is occasional gaming, development and browsing. I don't need a fast HDD system (which is why I can't justify SSD's yet). But I do want to replace my current drives and miss the speed I used to have in my old RAID 0 system a few years ago (probably slow compared to a single drive now though lol).

Sounds like it's probably just worth getting a pair of fast but reasonably quiet 3.5" drives. Thanks.

Any other opinions?
 
Can't really go wrong with any of the latest Samsung F1, WD Black of Seagate 7200.12 series - the seagates have great raw transfer rates if thats what your after but are quite average in other areas, they are however probably the quietest of the lot. Samsungs are also quiet and good performance, WD Blacks are prolly the best all around drive but not as quiet.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom