Raid 0 2x200gb SATA, Any recomendations?

eyemessiah

eyemessiah

eyemessiah

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Hi there I am planning to get a couple of sata drives and raid 0 them. I'm looking to spend around £120. Those 10,000rpm & 16mb cache drives look real nice, but I need more space than I can afford with those!

Do any of these leap out at anyone? There doesn't seem to be much between them really. I'd be tempted to go for the hitachi just for the extra 100gb, or maybe the maxtors because I have had good experiences with them in the past.


Any thoughts?



HD-048-WD Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 200GB 2000JS SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-048-WD)
£54.95 £109.90

HD-056-SE Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 NCQ 200GB ST3200827AS SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-056-SE)
£58.95 £117.90

HD-017-SA Samsung SpinPoint P SP2004C 200GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-017-SA)
£57.95 £115.90

HD-090-MD Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 NCQ 200GB 6V200E0 SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-090-MD)
£52.95 £105.90

HD-002-HI Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 NCQ 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (0A31636) (HD-002-HI)
£64.95 £129.90


thanks!
 
I'm just going to tack another question on here:

What stripe size should I be considering? The files I want to read/write faster (hence me picking raid 0) are large files, from several hundred mb, to 4-5gb in size (mainly uncompressed DV, but also some of those massive .paks and things that games use). As I understand it, any file smaller than the stripe size will not get striped, is this correct?

thanks
 
For speed: Hitachi, for quiestness: Samsung, Warranty: Seagate. I'd probably go for the Seagate with 5 yr warranty - good piece of mind especially with a (R)AID 0 array.

Stripes: Yes you are correct that any file less than the stripe size will only reside on one drive in the array. Since you'll be handling large files then you'll want the largest stripe size (I think it's 128k for most controllers). People will recommend smaller stripe sizes for Windows partitions since system partitions usually have lots of small files but considering the size of files you'll be dealing with, make the stripe as large as possible.
 
Excellent advice. OCuk never fails!

I wasn't aware that seagate had a 5 year warranty. Thats pretty damn good. The main reason for this upgrade is speed, so I'll take a closer look at the Hitachi's too.

About the stripes: Windows load time isn't something i'm too worried about. But if my large files are all going to be multi-megabyte, and max ss is 128k, then all my big files are going to get striped reguardless of the ss. Why can't I just set the ss low and stripe everything? Does striping become inefficient if you do it too much?


thanks!
 
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