Okay guys right now I own both of these hard drives. The 74GB Western Digital Raptor, and the Samsung SpinPoint 250GB hard drive. The Samsung hard drive is unbelievably quiet, and I was wondering what your opinions would be on replacing the 74GB raptor with another Samsung drive.
I know the Raptor is obviously faster, but I am debating if it is even worth it, or would the quietness of the Samsung be better? To be honest, I cannot even tell my Samsung is running inside of my Antec P180. When I do disk scans, and hard drive seeks, just to see if I can hear it - I can't hear a thing. The raptor is not loud at idle, but during disk seeks it does have the annoying crunching sound. While this is not that annoying, it would be nice to hear nothing when seeking.
So what do you guys think? Do you think the silence of the Samsung outweighs the Raptor? Or should I keep the Raptor because it is faster?
WD Raptor or Samsung SpinPoint?
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thetoad30
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If you got another Samsung, and your motherboard supports it (which most do these days) you could always RAID 0 your two drives together for a huge 500MB drive with roughly the same performance as your previous WD Raptor.
Just a thought.
However, if you had 2 Raptors RAIDed together, there would be almost nothing (save SCSI RAIDs, but that would be counter-productive) that could touch that performance.
Just a thought.
However, if you had 2 Raptors RAIDed together, there would be almost nothing (save SCSI RAIDs, but that would be counter-productive) that could touch that performance.
That was my exact plan if I got another 250GB Samsung....thetoad30 wrote:If you got another Samsung, and your motherboard supports it (which most do these days) you could always RAID 0 your two drives together for a huge 500MB drive with roughly the same performance as your previous WD Raptor.
Just a thought.
However, if you had 2 Raptors RAIDed together, there would be almost nothing (save SCSI RAIDs, but that would be counter-productive) that could touch that performance.
I was thinking that having two in a RAID 0 array should be pretty much the same performance as the Raptor.
So far I am leaning towards purchasing another Samsung drive. I'm very close to making my decision. I just wanna think about it a little bit more.
LOL, well I did like I said. I just purchased another Samsung SP 250gb. I am going to sell this Raptor once the new drive comes in. And of course, I am going to set up the two SP's in RAID0 configuration, and then probably partition it so I can have C: partition for applications, and a D: for storagethetoad30 wrote:Hehehe, what's to think about?
Go buy yourself another Samsung, then promptly send me your Raptor.
I live at...
Just don't put anything too valuable on those drives. If either one fails then say goodbye to everything on em. Realistically you aren't going to see much in the way of performance differences (unless you spend your days repeatedly loading game levels or video editing) between a RAID0 and two separate drives. It's not that there aren't measurable differences, there are, even noticeable ones. It's just that hard drives are so much slower than the rest of your computer that there performance will always be what slows you down. IF you really want to RAID0 go ahead but it is taking a risk with your data.
Actually all reliable real world tests i have seen have shown there is almost no benefit to using RAID 0 in a standard desktop environment. Also, part of the Raptor's advantage is the low seek time, which can only be achieved with a faster spindle speed (RAID can actually increase seek time since there are two drives on whcih to locate the data and then combine). I would not recommend going this route since there is almost no benefit (aside from the noise level) but you increase the possibility and probibility of losing your data.
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thetoad30
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So I have 4 WD 250 GB drives. When I installed them in RAID0 config ( 2 drives at 250GB) I noticed a little performance increase in my computer at the time. I then figured out that my RAID chip, one of the popular ones... ITE, had a major flaw in it: It capped my rates at 75MB/s. I have since gotten an ASUS board and use the SIIG onboard SATA controller, and my rates are up to 108-110MB/s. Granted, that's max, but sustained went from 35MB/s to 65MB/s.
While you say there is no performance advantage, I can clearly tell you that my performance has been at least 150% of a single drive. I can tell major improvements in terms of loading games, transfering files, backup speeds, and just overall throughput from the drives.
You say they are the slowest ones possible, so I ask this: Why not do everything you can to speed them up?
In all reality, I think that unless you suffer a major catostrophic failure instantly killing the hard drive, you will notice that a drive is starting to fail and you will be able to back it up.
I do, however, have a 120GB Seagate as a backup drive though, for that "just in case" scenario. Who knows, after this post God might try to smite me for my casual disregard to the inevitable drive failures.
While you say there is no performance advantage, I can clearly tell you that my performance has been at least 150% of a single drive. I can tell major improvements in terms of loading games, transfering files, backup speeds, and just overall throughput from the drives.
You say they are the slowest ones possible, so I ask this: Why not do everything you can to speed them up?
In all reality, I think that unless you suffer a major catostrophic failure instantly killing the hard drive, you will notice that a drive is starting to fail and you will be able to back it up.
I do, however, have a 120GB Seagate as a backup drive though, for that "just in case" scenario. Who knows, after this post God might try to smite me for my casual disregard to the inevitable drive failures.
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thetoad30
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Well, just for your information, you might not want to partition them that way. That will pretty much defeat the purpose of RAIDing them together, IMHO. If you aren't going to be using your storage for a lot of access, in otherwords the drive will be idle most the time, I would consider keeping the Raptor as your storage drive, since you say at idle you can't hear it.dynamiks wrote:LOL, well I did like I said. I just purchased another Samsung SP 250gb. I am going to sell this Raptor once the new drive comes in. And of course, I am going to set up the two SP's in RAID0 configuration, and then probably partition it so I can have C: partition for applications, and a D: for storagethetoad30 wrote:Hehehe, what's to think about?
Go buy yourself another Samsung, then promptly send me your Raptor.
I live at...
If you use it sparingly, you should be able to tolerate the seek noises because they will be few and far between.
You could also use that for backing up your data, since, as we all know, and we all do (yeah, right...
), backups are essential. Just a thought.
How come everytime people mention RAID-0 they always say you risk losing all that data...
When you run RAID-0 that doesn't mean you increase the risk of hard drive failure. It just means if one hard drive happens to fail, then you lose all your date from both drives. It doesn't mean that because you set up your drive to run in RAID-0 configuration that it is more likely to have a failure now. This is where people tend to scare others unnecessarily.
If you have one 500GB hard drive, its not going to be any more of a risk, than running two 250GB drives in RAID-0. Obviously when you are dealing with that much data it's always good to back up religiously anyway. Because if you have 500GB of data on your hard drive, I'm pretty sure you don't want to lose all that. Has to be tons of valuable stuff on there. So obviously people who have this much data know to backup religiously if you don't wanna lose anything.
I learned the hard way many years ago and lost alot of mp3s from one of my old hard drives that crashed. Now I always backup my stuff on DVD's, and keep em safe in a CD case.
The benefit of running RAID-0 is worth it to me over running the two hard drives serperately. If one of them crashes, your still going to loose 250GB of data, so either way its a big risk.
When you run RAID-0 that doesn't mean you increase the risk of hard drive failure. It just means if one hard drive happens to fail, then you lose all your date from both drives. It doesn't mean that because you set up your drive to run in RAID-0 configuration that it is more likely to have a failure now. This is where people tend to scare others unnecessarily.
If you have one 500GB hard drive, its not going to be any more of a risk, than running two 250GB drives in RAID-0. Obviously when you are dealing with that much data it's always good to back up religiously anyway. Because if you have 500GB of data on your hard drive, I'm pretty sure you don't want to lose all that. Has to be tons of valuable stuff on there. So obviously people who have this much data know to backup religiously if you don't wanna lose anything.
I learned the hard way many years ago and lost alot of mp3s from one of my old hard drives that crashed. Now I always backup my stuff on DVD's, and keep em safe in a CD case.
The benefit of running RAID-0 is worth it to me over running the two hard drives serperately. If one of them crashes, your still going to loose 250GB of data, so either way its a big risk.
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thetoad30
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True. However, statistically, you do double your chances of losing data.
If one hard drive has a 1 error in 1000 hours, then two hard drives have 2 errors per 1000 hours.
But, I totally agree with you. You still only lost one hard drive, but now ALL your data is corrupt. That's where RAID 10 or 0+1 (they are different, I know that, but I'm not sure which one is the preferred one) comes in. But you lose 50% drive space with that implementation. I was going to run this mode, but again, I don't know which one is better so I just stuck with RAID 0.
RAID5 is really reliable, but really expensive, and it is REALLY slow on desktop machines with no dedicated XOR engine or drives that spin 15K RPM and have a 320 SCSI backbone, or faster.
If one hard drive has a 1 error in 1000 hours, then two hard drives have 2 errors per 1000 hours.
But, I totally agree with you. You still only lost one hard drive, but now ALL your data is corrupt. That's where RAID 10 or 0+1 (they are different, I know that, but I'm not sure which one is the preferred one) comes in. But you lose 50% drive space with that implementation. I was going to run this mode, but again, I don't know which one is better so I just stuck with RAID 0.
RAID5 is really reliable, but really expensive, and it is REALLY slow on desktop machines with no dedicated XOR engine or drives that spin 15K RPM and have a 320 SCSI backbone, or faster.
Well hopefully I will be as lucky as I have been the past few years. The old 120GB WD I just replaced has been in use for about 3 years now, and hasn't failed me once. The last time I had a HD failure was on my old IBM Deskstar. But everyone knew those were prone to failure. But other than that, I've been lucky not to have any drives fail on me. Hopefully when I try out this RAID configuration everything will work smoothly.thetoad30 wrote:True. However, statistically, you do double your chances of losing data.
If one hard drive has a 1 error in 1000 hours, then two hard drives have 2 errors per 1000 hours.
But, I totally agree with you. You still only lost one hard drive, but now ALL your data is corrupt. That's where RAID 10 or 0+1 (they are different, I know that, but I'm not sure which one is the preferred one) comes in. But you lose 50% drive space with that implementation. I was going to run this mode, but again, I don't know which one is better so I just stuck with RAID 0.
RAID5 is really reliable, but really expensive, and it is REALLY slow on desktop machines with no dedicated XOR engine or drives that spin 15K RPM and have a 320 SCSI backbone, or faster.
I do have one question though. Why do you say I shouldn't partition the configuration? Isn't it better that way so it gets less fragmentation, and its easier to defrag?
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thetoad30
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In a RAID configuration, the hard drives are striped (I'm sure you knew that).
Remember that a hard drive fills in from the outside of the platter in - the less you have on your drive, the faster it will access data because the rotational speed at the end of the platter is faster than in the inside.
That being said, when you partition your drive, you FORCE the hard drive to keep a certain amount of space free for one partition, and then the heads have to move all the way into the beginning of the other partition. So basically you just removed the fastest part of RAID: the two hard drives splitting the data and doubling the speed at the same part in the platter.
That being said, its also wise to never fill a hard drive, or any magnetic media that rotates (like floppy drives) more than 50% full, because after that the MFT starts getting full, and your seek heads have to move past the middle of the drive. After 50% full, you just make the hard drive work more than it should and it starts to slow down because of seeks and other operations.
Also remember that the more files you have in a root directory, the faster the MFT fills up. This could actually cause the hard drive to think its full, and not allow any more files to be put into the root directory. This is the main reason people use folders. Just a little history I guess!
Anyway, that's why I wouldn't partition it. I would, if anything, keep your storage stuff in a seperate folder named, properly enough, Storage.
Remember that a hard drive fills in from the outside of the platter in - the less you have on your drive, the faster it will access data because the rotational speed at the end of the platter is faster than in the inside.
That being said, when you partition your drive, you FORCE the hard drive to keep a certain amount of space free for one partition, and then the heads have to move all the way into the beginning of the other partition. So basically you just removed the fastest part of RAID: the two hard drives splitting the data and doubling the speed at the same part in the platter.
That being said, its also wise to never fill a hard drive, or any magnetic media that rotates (like floppy drives) more than 50% full, because after that the MFT starts getting full, and your seek heads have to move past the middle of the drive. After 50% full, you just make the hard drive work more than it should and it starts to slow down because of seeks and other operations.
Also remember that the more files you have in a root directory, the faster the MFT fills up. This could actually cause the hard drive to think its full, and not allow any more files to be put into the root directory. This is the main reason people use folders. Just a little history I guess!
Anyway, that's why I wouldn't partition it. I would, if anything, keep your storage stuff in a seperate folder named, properly enough, Storage.
now that was good advice! and you explained everything well.. thanks for the advicethetoad30 wrote:In a RAID configuration, the hard drives are striped (I'm sure you knew that).
Remember that a hard drive fills in from the outside of the platter in - the less you have on your drive, the faster it will access data because the rotational speed at the end of the platter is faster than in the inside.
That being said, when you partition your drive, you FORCE the hard drive to keep a certain amount of space free for one partition, and then the heads have to move all the way into the beginning of the other partition. So basically you just removed the fastest part of RAID: the two hard drives splitting the data and doubling the speed at the same part in the platter.
That being said, its also wise to never fill a hard drive, or any magnetic media that rotates (like floppy drives) more than 50% full, because after that the MFT starts getting full, and your seek heads have to move past the middle of the drive. After 50% full, you just make the hard drive work more than it should and it starts to slow down because of seeks and other operations.
Also remember that the more files you have in a root directory, the faster the MFT fills up. This could actually cause the hard drive to think its full, and not allow any more files to be put into the root directory. This is the main reason people use folders. Just a little history I guess!
Anyway, that's why I wouldn't partition it. I would, if anything, keep your storage stuff in a seperate folder named, properly enough, Storage.
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thetoad30
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Sure thing! I'm glad I can help! I love computers, and helping other's with their's is something I love to do!
One day, we'll all have computers that will never crash. Just like in Star Trek. Could you imagine if one of their computers had a Blue Screen just as they started a battle... imagine... having to reload all that data from scratch, downloading drivers... reconfiguring all the systems... all while trying to keep from dying. Now, that will be the day Microsoft will have to own up...
LOL, ok that was a weird rant. I think its time for bed!
One day, we'll all have computers that will never crash. Just like in Star Trek. Could you imagine if one of their computers had a Blue Screen just as they started a battle... imagine... having to reload all that data from scratch, downloading drivers... reconfiguring all the systems... all while trying to keep from dying. Now, that will be the day Microsoft will have to own up...
LOL, ok that was a weird rant. I think its time for bed!
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Shining Arcanine
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Re: WD Raptor or Samsung SpinPoint?
I think you need to silence the Raptor with some kind of SmartDrive type enclosure.dynamiks wrote:So what do you guys think? Do you think the silence of the Samsung outweighs the Raptor? Or should I keep the Raptor because it is faster?
I love my 2 74 Raptors in RAID 0. I have a 80 PATA Seagate and an 80 Western Digital external drive for backing up stuff and storing the latest drivers, utilities, data, etc. I also have Ghost 9 which makes incremental back-ups to and copy it over to my other drives. Running RAID 0 just means you can't get sloppy about back-ups. Even a single drive can fail.
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~El~Jefe~
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There is no question, no doubt, that stripe-ing your drives, i.e, Raid 0 (its not raid, this annoys me, will vent in a second), that this will produce a faster everything.
it just does. it HAS for the past 6 years that I have tried it. I was doing it in linux, striping drives to one drive for much faster disk access and transfers. now in windows, it yet again goes faster. It's not raid at all though. raid 1 is raid. raid 0 has no redundancy, its just spreading info on two drives. we called it stripe-ing. shrugs. I never knew till a couple of months ago that this is what people call now raid 0. shrugs. well, point being, it works.
of course.... I feel.... that this means 2 drives which is noisier than 1.
In fact: I really wonder if the best option for most would be a raptor in the computer, and a 250 on the outside as storage. well for me that would be. of course, i cant afford a raptor, so thats about that.
it just does. it HAS for the past 6 years that I have tried it. I was doing it in linux, striping drives to one drive for much faster disk access and transfers. now in windows, it yet again goes faster. It's not raid at all though. raid 1 is raid. raid 0 has no redundancy, its just spreading info on two drives. we called it stripe-ing. shrugs. I never knew till a couple of months ago that this is what people call now raid 0. shrugs. well, point being, it works.
of course.... I feel.... that this means 2 drives which is noisier than 1.
In fact: I really wonder if the best option for most would be a raptor in the computer, and a 250 on the outside as storage. well for me that would be. of course, i cant afford a raptor, so thats about that.
RAID 0 just isn't worth it on a desktop computer. You double your chances to lose your data, and for almost no gain. You would be better off running the drives as seperate drives.
Please read these articles:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101
http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index ... iveVsRaid0
Basically the only time RAID 0 is worth it is if you move a lot of large files. Check out the game loading time differences in the Anandtech article. A whopping .9 seconds better than just one drive.
With RAID 0 you only ever see the benefit if running a synthetic benchmark. Real world differences are insignificant.
Read up on the Gigabyte i-RAM.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480
Even a SATA pure RAM based solution doesn't offer insane gains over a Raptor. You save a couple of seconds loading levels or booting Windows, but that's it.
So after reading these articles I hope you come to realise that RAID 0 is not the way to go.
Please read these articles:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101
http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index ... iveVsRaid0
Basically the only time RAID 0 is worth it is if you move a lot of large files. Check out the game loading time differences in the Anandtech article. A whopping .9 seconds better than just one drive.
With RAID 0 you only ever see the benefit if running a synthetic benchmark. Real world differences are insignificant.
Read up on the Gigabyte i-RAM.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480
Even a SATA pure RAM based solution doesn't offer insane gains over a Raptor. You save a couple of seconds loading levels or booting Windows, but that's it.
So after reading these articles I hope you come to realise that RAID 0 is not the way to go.
I like Storage Review a lot and yes I have read their article and no I'm not changing my mind because they (the forum folks) are so biased. I configured it with 16K clusters/16K stripe and it flys. Period, end of story. I'll happily run my synthetic benchmark and post it. It's fast. Real world is also fast and not "insignificant". Have you ever run a RAID 0 with 10K drives with equal cluster and stripe size??
I'll happily run my synthetic benchmark and post it. It's fast. Real world is also fast and not "insignificant". Have you ever run a RAID 0 with 10K drives with equal cluster and stripe size??
Last edited by suchageek on Sat Aug 06, 2005 11:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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thetoad30
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Agreed. I don't know why everyone takes all these synthetic benchmarks and all these other "site" benchmarks when they should just do it themselves and make the decision.suchageek wrote:I like Storage Review a lot and yes I have read their article and no I'm not changing my mind because they (the forum folks) are so biased. I configured it with 16K clusters/16K stripe and it flys. Period, end of story.
It seems like whenever there is a review, people always say "Don't just trust it, because sometimes its different with different configs, etc." But when it comes to the RAID subject, everyone FLIES in with links to this and that benchmark.
Try it yourself, you might be amazed. I wasn't thinking I would get all that much gain, but I tell you, when I'm loading 1600x1200 games, all my 6.3mp images, and Word and Outlook, my machine FLIES compared to non-RAID 0.
I haven't set my RAID up to equal clusters/stripes, as NTFS likes 4K clusters and my machine is at either 32, 64, or 128K stripes... its been a while since I looked at it so I can't remember!
Synthetic benchmarks are the one place you see a huge improvement in RAID 0. Post as many as you want - they mean nothing. Real world, well you say it's fast so it must be fast.suchageek wrote:I like Storage Review a lot and yes I have read their article and no I'm not changing my mind because they (the forum folks) are so biased. I configured it with 16K clusters/16K stripe and it flys. Period, end of story.
I have a 120GB Spinpoint and my programs load fast as well. I might lose a second here or there to you but whatever.
These sites aren't biased against RAID 0. They actually performed tests (rather than seat of the pants feel which always is inaccurate) and found out that RAID 0 doesn't offer much if any performance increases in a standard desktop environment.
Like the Storagereview article said, "It's up to you" however don't expect crazy performance increases from your current Raptor. In fact the Raptor seek time would be much better than RAID 0 spinpoints.
And I'm sorry I just have to comment on the Word and Outlook comment. I just tried opening Outlook and I couldn't even count to 2. Same with Word. I guess that means my harddrive is slow.
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thetoad30
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Well for your information I'm loading a 700MB outlook PST file. If you know anything about Outlook files, they are very inefficient.
So yeah, load up a 700MB Outlook file and then let me know how slow your hard drive is. Oh, and while you're at it, export it to another file and tell me how that goes too.
So yeah, load up a 700MB Outlook file and then let me know how slow your hard drive is. Oh, and while you're at it, export it to another file and tell me how that goes too.
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thetoad30
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Oh, and by the way you are talking here in terms of being only seconds faster, yet your main reason for not wanting to RAID drives is because the seek time goes down by a tenth of a MILLIsecond.
Milliseconds mean NOTHING in terms of human speed sensitivity.
And your speed gain over the search loss far outweighs.
Milliseconds mean NOTHING in terms of human speed sensitivity.
And your speed gain over the search loss far outweighs.
Maybe you missed where I said "Basically the only time RAID 0 is worth it is if you move a lot of large files."
to me a 700MB file is pretty big.
And the main reason for not wanting RAID 0, again from something I already posted (thanks for reading before you reply with my reasons)
"You double your chances to lose your data"
The original poster never anywhere mentioned he was using incredibly large files, he wants to replace his Raptor because it is loud and was wondering if he should RAID 0 his 250GB drives.
I stand by what I said, no you shouldn't RAID 0 your drives.
to me a 700MB file is pretty big.
And the main reason for not wanting RAID 0, again from something I already posted (thanks for reading before you reply with my reasons)
"You double your chances to lose your data"
The original poster never anywhere mentioned he was using incredibly large files, he wants to replace his Raptor because it is loud and was wondering if he should RAID 0 his 250GB drives.
I stand by what I said, no you shouldn't RAID 0 your drives.
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thetoad30
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Man, just back up. You have basically the same risk as with a main hard drive. You can still lose your data. It just depends on which drive he loses. Either way, he will lose data when a drive fails.
That's why we have backups. So that we CAN protect our data. And even then, with a backup, no data is ever really safe.
DVD's? Scratched. Or write errors. Or perhaps a bit of the reflective layer gets peeled off. Maybe it crackes when you take it out of the CD case. Perhaps you forgot to not put it on top of your desk where the sun hits every morning.
Same thing with CD's.
For the love of god, if you are that concerned about data loss, fricken take the computer, unplug it, and put everything in a firesafe safe.
That way the hard drive can never fail (its not running), and the computer can never be damaged by fire. Oh, forgot, you should lock it into a saferoom, that way a tornado can never get to it either. And dont' forget to perhaps put it on a table so floods can't get in either.
Hmm... what am I missing? Maybe you can tell me what I forgot, since you seem to be so damn protective of your data...
My point is this: For speed, RAID0 your drives, if you want to come close to the performance of your Raptor.
Regardless of the system you are using, most files on the computer will be larger than 16k or 32K, except for DLL files. Even then, who cares. The majority of your files will be loaded faster on a RAID array than on a non-RAID array.
And if you are so worried about your data, you shouldn't be using a fricken single drive or RAID0 anyway. Use RAID5 and have rigourous tape, CD, DVD, and network backups every day. Because you never know when lightning will strike... OH! That's what I was missing...
That's why we have backups. So that we CAN protect our data. And even then, with a backup, no data is ever really safe.
DVD's? Scratched. Or write errors. Or perhaps a bit of the reflective layer gets peeled off. Maybe it crackes when you take it out of the CD case. Perhaps you forgot to not put it on top of your desk where the sun hits every morning.
Same thing with CD's.
For the love of god, if you are that concerned about data loss, fricken take the computer, unplug it, and put everything in a firesafe safe.
That way the hard drive can never fail (its not running), and the computer can never be damaged by fire. Oh, forgot, you should lock it into a saferoom, that way a tornado can never get to it either. And dont' forget to perhaps put it on a table so floods can't get in either.
Hmm... what am I missing? Maybe you can tell me what I forgot, since you seem to be so damn protective of your data...
My point is this: For speed, RAID0 your drives, if you want to come close to the performance of your Raptor.
Regardless of the system you are using, most files on the computer will be larger than 16k or 32K, except for DLL files. Even then, who cares. The majority of your files will be loaded faster on a RAID array than on a non-RAID array.
And if you are so worried about your data, you shouldn't be using a fricken single drive or RAID0 anyway. Use RAID5 and have rigourous tape, CD, DVD, and network backups every day. Because you never know when lightning will strike... OH! That's what I was missing...
Wow don't get so defensive.
I do use RAID 5 and tape backups kept in a secure offsite facility - every single day at work. I restore files all the time. I replace 10K U320 SCSI hard drives that are hot swapable all the time.
We have terabytes of storage in RAID 5 using huge arrays - I realise the performance!
My point was (and I stated this in the first line of my first reply)
RAID 0 doubles your chances of losing all of your data, for little gain in a standard desktop environment.
Since you don't get much gain, why do it? I was just offering some articles from trusted hardware review websites, including their take on RAID 0.
Is it going to be faster than one drive, YES! Is the speed gain worth the risk? IT'S UP TO YOU
There are two sides to every argument, and I am just trying to offer the original poster the other side of the argument with facts to back up my points. If he wants to do it, that is up to him. He never stated he was working with huge photoshop files, or video files, or Outlook files, and because he never said this I don't believe RAID 0 is going to offer him any real tangible performance increases, so why put your data at twice the risk?
"You have basically the same risk as with a main hard drive."
actually statistically it is twice the risk of failure - hence the argument. If the risk was the same no one would say don't use RAID 0.
I do use RAID 5 and tape backups kept in a secure offsite facility - every single day at work. I restore files all the time. I replace 10K U320 SCSI hard drives that are hot swapable all the time.
We have terabytes of storage in RAID 5 using huge arrays - I realise the performance!
My point was (and I stated this in the first line of my first reply)
RAID 0 doubles your chances of losing all of your data, for little gain in a standard desktop environment.
Since you don't get much gain, why do it? I was just offering some articles from trusted hardware review websites, including their take on RAID 0.
Is it going to be faster than one drive, YES! Is the speed gain worth the risk? IT'S UP TO YOU
There are two sides to every argument, and I am just trying to offer the original poster the other side of the argument with facts to back up my points. If he wants to do it, that is up to him. He never stated he was working with huge photoshop files, or video files, or Outlook files, and because he never said this I don't believe RAID 0 is going to offer him any real tangible performance increases, so why put your data at twice the risk?
"You have basically the same risk as with a main hard drive."
actually statistically it is twice the risk of failure - hence the argument. If the risk was the same no one would say don't use RAID 0.
Re: WD Raptor or Samsung SpinPoint?
I've used both and I decided to keep my 74GB Raptor in my main system. The JVC motor in my Samsung SpinPoint sounded louder at idle than my Raptor. The Samsung is quiet and seeks are almost inaudible, but I prefer the quickness of my Raptor enough to ignore its loud seeks.
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~El~Jefe~
- Friend of SPCR
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You know what I dont understand?
well it's this:
what happens if your main single hardrive fails and burns up?
dont you lose all of your data?
whats the difference then if spanning it over 2 drives?
how often does this happen at all? In a corporate setting with 100's of computers, hardly ever, and they use some crap parts in these places my friend works in. Personally, only from dropping a hd has it failed on me. and not totally ever.
cant see the fear and raid 0 goes faster. dont think it doesnt, just does, without sythetic benchmarks. I have to say though that hd speed has little if no meaning to much in gaming, in productivity or just about anything i can think of besides booting windows, something i do once every week.
maybe on load scenes for half-life2 and a bit on bf2. however, that doesnt happen during gameplay, if it did, even in the fastest scenario, it would be pathetically slow compared to the processing of that informatiion.
well it's this:
what happens if your main single hardrive fails and burns up?
dont you lose all of your data?
whats the difference then if spanning it over 2 drives?
how often does this happen at all? In a corporate setting with 100's of computers, hardly ever, and they use some crap parts in these places my friend works in. Personally, only from dropping a hd has it failed on me. and not totally ever.
cant see the fear and raid 0 goes faster. dont think it doesnt, just does, without sythetic benchmarks. I have to say though that hd speed has little if no meaning to much in gaming, in productivity or just about anything i can think of besides booting windows, something i do once every week.
maybe on load scenes for half-life2 and a bit on bf2. however, that doesnt happen during gameplay, if it did, even in the fastest scenario, it would be pathetically slow compared to the processing of that informatiion.
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Michael Sandstrom
- Posts: 606
- Joined: Wed Oct 13, 2004 4:03 pm
- Location: Albany, GA USA