michael baxter said:
A RAID 0 setup improves bandwidth, the latency doesn't change over a single identical drive.
A single raptor will have a lower bandwidth than a RAID 0 array in most cases, but it's latency is much lower.
If that doesn't make sense:
RAID 0: good performance for large files, e.g. video editing
Single Raptor: good performance for OS and small files
meh, the couple area's raptors beat out 7200 drives you simple can't feel the difference, the area's a raid 0 7200 setup is better you can see the difference. raid 0 seagates/maxtor/hitachi is better performance feels much nippier than non raid, insanely good unrar'ing performance which if you dl anything rar'd all the time is a godsend.
in general and for YEARS this has been true, raid 0 performance depends on controller but also on the firmware on the drive, up untill recently wd were always pretty damn poor at raid 0, they now do raid specific drives but i've never tried one and afaik still aren't considered up there for raid 0 performance.
the KING, always been the best has been well, IBM and now hitachi. check the newest hitachi drives on anandtech, they MATCH or beat the raptor basically in every benchmark, in single or raid mode, IE hitachi single 7200 beats or matches a single raptor, and hitachi raid is better than raptor raid also. while they are terrabyte drives they are also coming in smaller cheaper capacities. whatever way you do it you can basically get 3/4 times the capacity for the same price and similar or better performance than raptors. or you can get similar capacity for way way cheaper and still generally better performance. i think at the moment for raid hitachi is king still, then probo maxtor, seagate have made a slight comeback but seagate/wd just never seem to get same out of their raid 0 performance. hell, the hitachi drive gets 74mb sustained read and 142 sustained in raid 0, thats simply amazing. seagate used to offer firmware upgrades to get better raid performance as their stock firmware was often worse in raid, but that was years ago.
the extreme low latency isn't that useful to be honest, servers access 100k's of tiny files a day for thousands of users and low latency is king, in a home set up latency is almost not important. which is why the new and fancy solid state drives aren't being sold en masse because while low latency(1ms, raptor is around 7-8ms and the 1tb hitachi is 13-14ms) the transfer rate is no where near the hitachi and they just overall suck for performance.
the main problem with raptors is price, they are enterprise, they have 5 year warrantys, who needs one, in 2-3 years your main drives will without doubt be solid state, and keeping a fast loud small capacity drive as backup won't happen. however you might keep your hitachi 500gb as backup in 3 years.
