Wanting a Fast Setup...

Monstermunch · 10 Apr 2008 at 11:39

Hi all, been outa the loop for a while as far as HDD's are concerned but i've done a bit of reading up and the drive that a lot of sites have singled out for being ultra fast & reliable are the new Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives. Especially the 320gb version (which seems to be the fastest)

I plan on setting up a RAID0 array of 4 HDD's and will be using a separate controller card like this one http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support/sata/sataii/AAR-1430SA/

Now my question is, I have found that Seagate have a 250gb 32mb Barracuda ES.2 HDD available...

Or will the 7200.11 16mb be faster??? :confused:

Monstermunch · 10 Apr 2008 at 12:07

Netvyper said:
I believe the 7200.11 are characterised by slow access times, reportedly between 18-22ms on average. This is often slightly increased by running a RAID Array, and therefore might not be ideal; but it would put out a hell of an STR with those disks .

http://teamlosi.andrevas.net/pics/320.JPG
No the Hitachi Deskstar and the Seagate Barracudas are currently the fastest in their field (or so I have been reading & seen screenies) with a 8.5ms seek time, followed closely by WD & Samsung which are 9ms & 8.9ms respectively IIRC... & as far as Maxtor are concerned please dont go there

Netvyper said:
I think the Spinpoint F1 320gbs are considered slightly quicker drives, but only have the 3yr warranty, and are also difficult to acquire atm.

TBH, not read much about the F1's, u got any links?

Netvyper said:
Are you intending to use this array as your primary boot device, or simply for fast data storage?

Yea, primary boot drives

Monstermunch · 10 Apr 2008 at 12:08

MilanoChris said:
The WD 320 AAKS single platters are very quick. Just don't think there's a way to find out if you're getting a single platter or not.

Have you considered SCSI?

Yea, considered... but then realised that four of these are faster and cheaper than a SCSI setup

Monstermunch · 10 Apr 2008 at 12:18

MilanoChris said:
Depends where you get the SCSI drives

drives maybe... but to be faster than the <£250 lot i mentioned you couldnt beat that performance with SCSI for the price when you factor in 2x SCSI Drives and a Control Card, kiss goodbye to at least £300-£350

Monstermunch · 11 Apr 2008 at 13:31

rpstewart said:
Have you thought about I/O contention at all? Having a 4 disk RAID0 array is just like having a single big (quick) disk, as soon as you start doing simultaneous reads and writes the throughput goes down pretty sharply.

It depends very much on what you personally want to do on the machine though.

Benchmark & Gaming is pretty much all I do with it TBH

Monstermunch · 11 Apr 2008 at 16:51

milkinc13 said:
if your wanting a fast set-up wouldn't either a signle SSD, 2 SSD's in RAID 0 work? there faster than conventional drives, but there is the large cost of purchasing them at the mo

Exactly why im looking for sommink a bit cheaper... SDD is deffo the way to go but only when I dont have to sell a kidney first!

Monstermunch · 11 Apr 2008 at 19:14

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13732/13

Monstermunch · 12 Apr 2008 at 00:40

AbsenceJam said:
With Techreport you should look at their latest review as they add drives and keep the older ones in the graphs.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14380/13

Relevant for you:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14380/5

Rofl, that first post shows the random access time as being faster with the Seagates than the F1's & also shows the Seagates average read of about 30mb/s less than is being claimed by other benchies i have seen... :confused: