Replacing 2 small Raid arrays with a 3x1TB F1 array, faster?

Trixxy

Trixxy

Trixxy

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20 Oct 2002
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Hello, I'm thinking about getting 3 of those 1TB Samsung F1 drives to replace my current setup as they are super cheap just now.

current setup:

2x 36GB (8MB cache) Raptors in Raid 0
c: Vista64 (35GB)
d: XP32 (35GB)

3x 250GB WD 2500KS in Raid 0
e: Main (500GB)
f: Games (200GB)

both Raid arrays are on the Intel controller on my Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3P mobo.

I also have various backup drives in USB/e-sata caddies.


I keep running out of space though and would like to replace both Raid arrays with:

3x Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB drives in Raid 0 (keeping same partitions as above, only bigger).

Would this be any faster than what I have currently?

I know of the stupidity of Raiding 3 1TB drives... I promise I won't come on here crying if 1 dies. :D

Thanks.
 
Why not get four 750GB hard drives and RAID 5 or 10 them? That way you get a bit of protection and you can stripe (can't remember which one it is, 5 or 10).
 
Both do some striping, Raid 5 is striping with parity, raid 10 (aka 1+0) is a stripe of mirrors, meaning it's like a raid0, but each of the disks is duplicated. Raid 10 is much easier on your raid controller, and is more resilient, but obviously you only get half the drives in your array to store data on.
 
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My one concern with going to a single array would be that you have no way of escaping I/O contention. It depends what you're wanting to use the machine for but anything which involves simultaneous read/write (or read/read) activity will be fairly slow.

For example I keep all my photos on a separate drive from the Lightroom and ACDSee Thumbnail databases so that when I need to update the thumbnails one drive only reads and one only writes. Having both on the same drive is painful.
 
Yeah, I was hoping that having 3 really fast drives in Raid 0 would make up for going from 2 arrays to 1. The old 8MB Raptors are showing their age compared to these new drives and would like to upgrade, I'll have a look at maybe getting a solid-state for OS, then some F1's for main data... not really looked for a while to see if the SS drives are any good compared to the ones last year.

I thought about using Raid 5/10 etc, but I've been using Raid 0 for about 7 years and never lost a thing, so I'd rather keep using it until something bad happens. I have about 2TB of storage in USB/e-sata caddies, so all my important stuff goes on them. :)
 
better off raiding 3x 320gb drives in raid0 and having other single 1tb drives for backup & storage


3tb of data is a lot to lose
 
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