Quick Raid0/HDD choice question

[tibbsey]

Hi all,

Planning on regiggling my hard drives to have the following setup:

- Raid0 for OS and Apps
- 500GB for Games
- 1TB for Data
- 640GB for Data Backup

I have limited experience with Raid, the only experience being with Raid1.

My question is which hard drive/s or setup would be fastest for the Raid0.
The choices are at the moment:
1) 2 x 250GB HDDs - newer hard drives with 16MB cache
2) 3 x 160GB HDDs - older hard drives with 8MB cache

The drives I have been looking at are:
- For the 250GB drives:
250GB Samsung F1 - 16MB cache

- For the 160GB drives:
160GB Western Digital Caviar Blue - 8MB cache

So which would be better, 2x250GB faster drives, or 3x160GB slightly slower drives?

Oh, also which stripe size would be best for OS/Applications.

Cheers in advance,

tibbsey

p.s Merry Xmas all

 

[acantril]

I'd personally go with 2 x the 250 GB f1's. I've been looking into it over the last few days and the performance of these drives seems to be really good. The only thing to thing about is while 3 x drives MAY (depending on the controller) give some benefit, your chance of failure increases with each additional drive.

 

[Mike1983]

Here's my opinion...

I run a RAID 0 setup like many others on here and have had no problems. You should bear in mind though that the more discs you add to a RAID 0 array the increased chance of losing everything become. In other words, your suggested 2 disc setup is less likely to fail than your suggested 3 disc setup. Although you didn't mention any of this in your post I just think it is something you should also consider.

Now to your actual questions, I think the 3 disc setup would be a little faster than the 2 disc setup but taking into account what I mention above I would suggest considering upgrading the 2 disc setup to 2 of the Samsung F1 320Gb models rather than the 250Gb. The 320Gb has an increased data density which results in faster speeds than that provided by the 250Gb models.

Stripe size... there is no best stripe size, the best thing you can do is use the search button and search for this term and do some reading up so you can come to a conclusion based on your typical PC usage. In general though, the smaller the stripe size you use, the faster the drives become but the greater reliance on defragging. A higher stripe size would be slightly slower in general usage than a smaler stripe size but provide much better results when using larger files like video encoding and 3D graphics modelling etc. The current trend seems to be around the 32kb or 64kb mark for all round general usage but as I say I'd do a search and come to your own conclusion as to whether you should go into the smaller / larger bands. If you're just using the RAID disc for O/S and apps though I'd opt for 32kb.

 

[tibbsey]

Thanks for the speedy responses.

Very good point about the likelihood of failure with more drives, completely forgot about that.

I've opted for the 2 drive config, with some (hopefully) fast 320GB F1s.

Have just placed my order and should have them tomorrow.

After having done some more reading I think I probably will go for the 32KB stripe size.

Thanks again for the replies.

Merry Christmastime. <3

 

[Ben M]

use two disks, but get the 320gb F1s if you can stretch to it.