SATAII's over Raptors? - RAID 5 or 0?

refoowbuS

refoowbuS

refoowbuS

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14 Jun 2006
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Hi all... I could really use some help on this... :)
I've seen in tons of forums that 4x SATAII drives (RAID 0) will out perform 2x WD raptors, (my two 36GB raptors, RAID 0, on the right):

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I'd really appreciate some opinions on my decision to go for 4x WD 250GB SATAII's and whether I should be safe and use RAID 5 or go for RAID 0. Thanks...
 
4 sata drives will outperform 2 raptors....surely 4 raptors will outperform 4 satas? Seems like an entirely pointless statement to me. Also, why have you tested your hard drive with different test settings?
 
It was more of a question than a statement... simply wanted to know if 4x SATA II will definitely outperform 2x Raptors.........there's a lot of confliting reports out there.

I'm set on getting 4 SATA II's anyway........ so I would appreciate advice/experiences on any risks with 4 drive on RAID 0, are these drives unlikly to let you down as long as you've got serge protectors, good hardware firewall ect...
 
if your raptors are the newer models 16mb cache they problay peform a lot better, 2 raptors 16mb cache on a decent controller should get
140+ read mb/s
 
Thanks for the advice james, I guess most peoples votes would be with the raptors :) ... It's just that I've seen some killer results posted with 4xSATAII's RAID0... I'm not sure if even 2 raptors could top what I'm seeing :confused:
 
I am looking at getting three SATA II drives and i have seen HD tach burst Read speed of 308mb/s and a average of 149mb/s, with 4 SATA II drives you get a burst speed of 359.5mb/s and a average read of 156.5mb/s, so not to bad. :D

Edit just seen 4x hitachi 7k80s that have a burst speed of 361.2MB/s and an average read speed of 193.6MB/s, i know what i want now and all for the price of one raptor. :eek:
 
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:D That's what I'm talkin about! That'll reduce the bottleneck I'm getting...

Could anyone give advice on whether 4 drives on RAID 0 are too risky?
 
For any critical data, I would say yes 4 drives in RAID0 is too risky. For a system drive with windows and programs on, then I wouldn't say its too risky. As long as you are able and willing to reinstall all the software if a drive dies. Another option would be to get 8 drives in RAID10 :D . Also remember that transfer speed isn't the only factor to a drive feeling fast, as access time plays a large part, and this is where the Raptor wins hands down.
 
Cheers for the advice Khan... a friend told me that RAID 5 with 4 drives would give you the safety plus as good performance as RAID 0, is that right? I'm not so sure.
 
refoowbuS said:
Cheers for the advice Khan... a friend told me that RAID 5 with 4 drives would give you the safety plus as good performance as RAID 0, is that right? I'm not so sure.
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RAID5 is computationally expensive (whereas RAID0 is relatively cheap), so if you buy a cheap card to do the processing, the card's processor probably won't be that fast and throughput will be far lower than with RAID0. To get good performance you'd have to spend quit a bit on a beefy RAID5 card. And in any case, you'd probably never get the same performance from n drives in RAID5 as you would get in RAID0.
 
Cheers ByteJuggler... I've got a GA-G1975X (G1 Turbo) mobo that supports RAID 0, 0+1 and 5.......It's worked great with RAID 0 so far, but I've got no idea if it's onboard controller is any good with RAID 5 though?
 
cymatty said:
I am looking at getting three SATA II drives and i have seen HD tach burst Read speed of 308mb/s and a average of 149mb/s, with 4 SATA II drives you get a burst speed of 359.5mb/s and a average read of 156.5mb/s, so not to bad. :D

Edit just seen 4x hitachi 7k80s that have a burst speed of 361.2MB/s and an average read speed of 193.6MB/s, i know what i want now and all for the price of one raptor. :eek:
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thats nothing m8 i got 2 scsi 15rpm that get nearly 600 burst and 180 read thats only 2 drives, acces times of 5.3ms
 
they were a lot cheaper than buying from shops, cost the same as 36gb raptors
its the raid card that costs, same as any sata 2 controller
2 raptors on a areca will fly compared to nvidia and intel crap raid solutions
 
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james32 said:
they were a lot cheaper than buying from shops
its the raid card that costs, same as any sata 2 controller
2 raptors on a areca will fly compared to nvidia and intel crap raid solutions
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Oh yes I agree, but it will cost nearly 3 times as much as 4x80gb drives and have less storage so i suppose it depends upon budget. :)
 
cymatty said:
Oh yes I agree, but it will cost nearly 3 times as much as 4x80gb drives and have less storage so i suppose it depends upon budget. :)
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but if your going to use 4 drives raid 0 on a motherboard controller
forget it, as your cpu will be suffer from high utilization

nvidia chipset suffers from using more than 2 drives raided
problay intel ich7 will be the same, always better buying a addon card
this will give you more breathing space and less cpu utilization.
 
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