What's faster? Two ATA100 40G's in RAID 0 or one ATA133 120GB?

[Bires]

Like the subject says...I currently have two 40G drives. Speed is more important to me than size.

[Showtime]

I believe the dual 40's( :cheers: )would be faster.
ATA 100 isnt that much slower than 133.

-jel:halo:

[Ladogaboy]

I think it might also depend on the drives... I'm pretty sure that a WD SE 120 gig is faster alone than 2 40 gig 5400 rpm drives in RAID 0.

[Bires]

The drives are seagate ATA100 7200 drives. They rate about 21MB/s each, with the array about 34MB/s (in Sandra).

[LegendKiller]

Well, I am a major opponant of IDE RAID, as far the majority of the solutions go. I am all for hardware raid cards, and the redundancy of RAID 1 or 5.

I would not recommend RAID, even with Seagate drives (which I personally think are some of the best out there). The chances of failure and losing all data is too great. Furthermore, your killing your CPU times (taking at least a 12% hit in CPU times) by doing software raid. Sandra does not take this into account.

If you want to continue this, have you gotten the more "raid friendly" seagate drives? You can get ahold of Seagate and get the drives with firmware tuned to RAID.


LK

[Bires]

Originally posted by LegendKiller
You can get ahold of Seagate and get the drives with firmware tuned to RAID.

What makes one drive more RAID friendly more than another?
BTW: I use the on-board Promise RAID controller on my mobo. I also have a Promise Fasttrak100 in my other computer.

[Heihachi]

That's just opinion. I've been running raid0 for about a year now. No problems EVEN using the infamous 75gxp drives.

Personally I'd go w/ 2x 80gb WD 8MB drives in raid.. hehe

[NuTs62]

I have 3 120GB WD SE's in a RAID5 at the moment, about to take it apart to single drives, to get more space. I didn't notice any faster speeds in RAID5. In fact, my system paled in comparison to others on here when we did a benchmark several months ago.

[ribitch]

most users of these boards are speed freaks and tweakers. With that being said, it can be assumed that many of us, if not all of us know that tweaking a system can lead to an increased risk of total data lose. Since strippng 2 drives is a "tweak" so to say, we know that now we have 2 potential drives that can fail at any given moment. Data that s crucial should always be backed up. Anything else on the drives that isnt backed up should not be critical if lost.

With that being said, raid is the faster of the 2 options. you can access data on 2 ide channels at once. As said before, the ata133 is faster during a busrt, but during a sustained read/write they are almost neck and neck. Splitting the sustained read/write over 2 devices will allow the read or write happen theoretically twice as fast.

if you need better data reliability, stay with 1 drive, or 2 drives mirrored. If you want speed, go for the stripe, just remember the speed is coming at the cost of increasing the possibility of hardware failure.

[Ladogaboy]

Originally posted by DarkFury
Which is probably why I have stayed away from RAID so far...

However, did anyone know how much faster RAID really is here? Or is it just for the benefits of those few people that do it just to say "they have it"? :shrug:

I think it depends on what you are doing with it. Lots of loading and unloading of software; massive data transfers; videorecording; and the like will probably see a performance boost from RAID. Other than that, I doubt that you would see much.

I remember reading a couple of articles that showed little to no improvement when gaming with a RAID array.

Oh, and Nuts, the reason you probably had bad performance scores on your array was because you were running RAID 5... there is no way RAID 5 can compete with RAID 0 for speed.

[NuTs62]

Originally posted by Ladogaboy
Oh, and Nuts, the reason you probably had bad performance scores on your array was because you were running RAID 5... there is no way RAID 5 can compete with RAID 0 for speed.

K, gotcha :) my RAID 0 before, 2 IBM deathstars 75GB's were pretty slow before too.. :shrug: oh well, currently moving all my data off my raid 5.. :)

[Ladogaboy]

Originally posted by NuTs62
oh well, currently moving all my data off my raid 5.. :)

Haha, where to? :D

[NuTs62]

Originally posted by Ladogaboy


Haha, where to? :D

brother bought me 2 120gb drives.. and brought a 80gb for himself.. swapping.. just used partition magic.. within 6 minutes, all 3 120gb drives reformatted! AWESOME! hehe.. now i'm gonna need a bigger case, and an 8-port raid controller or nas soon..

i'm wondering though, what i should do about the OS partition..? my 45gb IBM is dying.. wondering whether i should use a 120gb as the primary, or split that up.. or...? :confused: damn these IBM's! :angry:

[Ladogaboy]

Originally posted by NuTs62


brother bought me 2 120gb drives.. and brought a 80gb for himself.. swapping.. just used partition magic.. within 6 minutes, all 3 120gb drives reformatted! AWESOME! hehe.. now i'm gonna need a bigger case, and an 8-port raid controller or nas soon..

i'm wondering though, what i should do about the OS partition..? my 45gb IBM is dying.. wondering whether i should use a 120gb as the primary, or split that up.. or...? :confused: damn these IBM's! :angry:

Wait... so now you have 5 WD SE 120 gig drives? :eek: :drool:

Anyway, if I were you, I'd take one of those 120 gig drives, create a 20 gig primary partition for your OS and use the other 100 gigs for storage and stuff.

[NuTs62]

Originally posted by Ladogaboy


Wait... so now you have 5 WD SE 120 gig drives? :eek: :drool:

Anyway, if I were you, I'd take one of those 120 gig drives, create a 20 gig primary partition for your OS and use the other 100 gigs for storage and stuff.

now have 6 :D a 45gb IBM and 60gb IBM thats dying, a 75gb IBM that still works but still not sure if i want to put that back in. and a 60gb WD RMA'd thats coming back.