spec me a raid setup

233 · 21 Jan 2007 at 23:48

well peeps looking for a fast setup for my rig,

currently its built round a asrock dual sata 939 board,(can you tell i'm new to sata and raid yet)

i'm not bothered about redundancy as i tend to back everything up to dvd anyway. i just want a large capacity storage solution with the fastest performance possible

budget circa 250 quid??????

mosfet · 22 Jan 2007 at 00:17

If you can stretch to £300:

2x WD Raptor 150GB:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-069-WD

Would be ideal, 300GB of storage with the fastest possible throughput and response times for consumer disks.

If 300GB isn't enough then you use 2x Seagate 7200.10 320GB drives in RAID0. This seems to be quite popular on here - they're fast drives and offer the best value (price per gigabyte).

If I were you, however, I'd just get a single fast system drive such as a Raptor 740ADFD and a large storage drive such as a WD5000YS RE2 or Seagate 7200.10 500GB. Avoids possible complications and annoyances with RAID and gives you a little bit of redundancy if you have your important data on both drives.

233 · 22 Jan 2007 at 00:18

whats the possibilities of having 4 h/d's?

mosfet · 22 Jan 2007 at 00:32

On your board? 2x SATA and 2x PATA will be fine, but you won't be mixing them in RAID unless you have an external controller that support IDE RAID controller spanning.

I wouldn't recommend a consumer 4 drive RAID for speed, go for a combination of drives that suit your needs.

silversurfer · 22 Jan 2007 at 08:55

I have a PCI IDE ATA 133 raid card, is that quite sucky incomparison to the onboard conroe chipset? The attraction is the raid can go wherever the card does instead of being specific to this one motherboard

If it were me with that much money for raid I would have 1 raptor for a boot/windows drive and 2 x the seagates for the big data storage raid. The thinking being its hard to improve a raptors performance even in a raid

rpstewart · 22 Jan 2007 at 09:13

silversurfer said:
I have a PCI IDE ATA 133 raid card, is that quite sucky incomparison to the onboard conroe chipset? The attraction is the raid can go wherever the card does instead of being specific to this one motherboard

The PCI card will be limited by the 133Mb/s bandwidth of the PCI bus, this can be a bottleneck if you're using more than 2 disks or the 2 you have are quick. The onboard RAID on most boards is either in the southbridge or directly attached to the system bus and hence won't be bottlenecked in the same way. However as you say the card will allow you to move the card from one machine to another if you need to.

silversurfer said:
If it were me with that much money for raid I would have 1 raptor for a boot/windows drive and 2 x the seagates for the big data storage raid. The thinking being its hard to improve a raptors performance even in a raid

A RAID0 array of even average 7200rpm disk will give you a sustained transfer rate in excess of what a single Raptor can provide although it can't get close to the seek times of the Raptor. With decent disks you can outrun a pair of 36Gb Raptors and get close to a pair of 74s, a pair of 150s will however outrun a pair of anything this side of SCSI.