Wanting a Fast Setup...

Monstermunch

Monstermunch

Monstermunch

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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:
 
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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 :p.

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

Are you intending to use this array as your primary boot device, or simply for fast data storage?
 
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?
 
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 :p.
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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.
Click to expand...

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?
Click to expand...

Yea, primary boot drives
 
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Monstermunch said:
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;)
Click to expand...

Maxtor are now owned by Seagate... and I belive the newer drives are rebranded seagates, or very similar thus.
As for the seek times;
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17863107
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17862965

And several other threads in this section.



Monstermunch said:
TBH, not read much about the F1's, u got any links?
Click to expand...
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17863205
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17850232

Monstermunch said:
Yea, primary boot drives
Click to expand...

Being your primary storage, I would be quite concerned about the new 7200.11s & their apparent seek time issue.
Obviously though, more research is required if your looking at spending enough for 4disks + controller.
 
Monstermunch said:
Yea, primary boot drives
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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.
 
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.
Click to expand...

Benchmark & Gaming is pretty much all I do with it TBH
 
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
 
SSDs are quicker in terms of access times but unless you spend a really daft amount (think car money) they're still a fair bit behind mechanical disks in terms of sustained transfers.
 
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
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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! :p
 
If the only practical thing you do is game then you gain nothing by having anything more than a single 7200rpm drive. The only gain you would get is loading times that are literally a couple of seconds faster.

milkinc13 said:
i thought that they had higher sustained transfer speed when compaired to mechanical disks
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Only the really, really expensive ones.
 
I'm inclined to trust their results since they test all the drives using the same setup and methodology three times (result is an average). If you look at benchmarks for any drive from all over the net you'll see all manner of variance.
 
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