DaPoets Posted October 19, 2007 Share Posted October 19, 2007 I added a drive and migrated from Raid 0 to Raid 5 using 3 sata drives now. I like the performance of Raid 0 a lot plus the piece of mind of redundancy is great. Using xp64 too w/ 4gb ram. My temps have gone up a bit on my quad core but I did read that Raid 5 is a bit more demanding on the cpu than other raids. I will be adding a 4th drive probably next week since I have also read that going from a 3 drive raid 5 to a 4 drive raid 5 increases performance by about 25%. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ParoxysM Posted October 19, 2007 Share Posted October 19, 2007 What exactly do you do what your pc again that you need all this stuff?? Does it make you money? Just curious... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
B.Ob. Posted October 19, 2007 Share Posted October 19, 2007 I find it easier just to get the fastest hard drive you can afford instead of decreasing your MTBF by getting more hard drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaPoets Posted October 19, 2007 Author Share Posted October 19, 2007 From what I have seen, Raid 0 and Raid 5 are excellent for gaming, video editing, and sound editing. Plus 4 average hard drives raided will cost less and outperform a fairly high end hard drive. My current raid greatly outperforms a single raptor and it's a lot quieter too. As for the money question, I work from home a great deal for HSBC so I want a fast and stable computer. Plus I am playing some game every night so I like to make sure my system can have everything on high. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PurSuiT Posted October 19, 2007 Share Posted October 19, 2007 I have to agree on the price per performance vs size. Raptors only come in 150GB max @ $180, you could go with 2 WD 7200RPM 160GB drives for $50 less get 2x the storage and the same if not more performance. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136062 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
B.Ob. Posted October 19, 2007 Share Posted October 19, 2007 Well, you'll get twice the performance if you stripe them, but not twice the size. MTBF for the 160g is 1 Million Hours (divide by 2 since you have 2 drives) and the 150g raptor has 1.2 Million Hours MTBF, Oddly the 150g Raptor pulls 10.02 Watts when read/write, while the 160g pulls 10.75 Watts (times 2 drives) Price per performance, the 2 drives got it! MTBF I think are grossly exaggerated (as I still see drive fail). You need at least two drives, which increasing the number of drives makes it MUCH more likely to fail, unless you do a fully recoverable RAID set, which is 3+ drives. And of course you have your power requirements going up. (Granted nothing compared to video cards and cpu's, but goes up never-the-less) Did I mention the possible hassle of getting a good RAID set working on your motherboard chipset and also being able to install an OS to it. (which is usually doable without too much pain sometimes, but still a consideration) So cost goes up significantly if you opt to get a separate RAID card. Another consideration, that WD160g is built for 24/7 operation, but what if you pick other drives, are they built for 24/7? Sadly many are not anymore. Anyway, thats my 4.5 cents.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaPoets Posted October 19, 2007 Author Share Posted October 19, 2007 (edited) Yep I'm actually using 3 of these and just bought my 4th. Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600AAJS 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s I have been able to get them online for only $45 a piece. This last one was $42 plus $6 for 3 day shipping. So 4 of these 160gb in a raid 5 actually equates to 480gb of storage space at a cost of $45 x 4 = $180 giving more speed and capacity than a raptor and redundancy as well. Check the reviews on just a single drive not in a raid. Edited October 19, 2007 by DaPoets Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
B.Ob. Posted October 20, 2007 Share Posted October 20, 2007 Ok, gonna keep babbling... Nice stats above, but some are not vaild for comparing a single drive to a raid set, temperature (cause you have multiple drives) and more drives to block air flow, acoustics: are you really concerned about noise if your building a raid set for speed?!? Strange how the Pure Hard disk performance the Raptor scored SO low, yet it was the fastest loading a game.... /me steps off soapbox Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaPoets Posted October 20, 2007 Author Share Posted October 20, 2007 I like quiet hard drives. I never did like the sound of some of my old drives when they were cranking away. I prefer to just see the HD light going. My fans are fairly quiet as well. I have space for 8 regular size hard drives and I'll have 4 drives evenly spread out w/ 2 fans blowing on them, but as you saw, they are some of the coolest running drives around anyway. The temps that have gone up are my motherboard due to it having more work to do managing all the drives but it's nothing that concerns be because I'm at my max overclock anyway. I think I will need some high end watercooling to go much faster but the price for that compared to the extra 200mhz - 300mhz doesn't justify it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ParoxysM Posted October 20, 2007 Share Posted October 20, 2007 ROFL, all the graphs that don't matter. If you were worried about temps and heat then why do you have 4 CPUs pegged @ 100%, 4 hard drives, 2 video cards, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaPoets Posted October 20, 2007 Author Share Posted October 20, 2007 I guess I don't understand.... I wanted low heat due to all the other heat generating stuff, low sound just because I like a quiet system, and great response and redundancy, thus the raid 5. I think I have finally created the ideal system I have been wanting for a long time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
B.Ob. Posted October 20, 2007 Share Posted October 20, 2007 The 1950pro's is certainly a good choice between all out performance and heat. If you had a pair of the cards myself or PurSuiT has, you might need a beefier power supply and would certainly generate a LOT more heat. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PurSuiT Posted October 20, 2007 Share Posted October 20, 2007 Well, alot of this also does not matter, as it is all about personal preferance also. The best option for would be to get 4 Raptor 150's, mind you not at all quiet or cool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaPoets Posted October 20, 2007 Author Share Posted October 20, 2007 that's probably the best option for best performance but not the best option for a good cost/benefit ratio. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaPoets Posted October 24, 2007 Author Share Posted October 24, 2007 More is well... more right? So keeping that in mind, I want more speed... so when adding my 4th sata II drive, I'm going to use the 1st 20gigs on each drive as a raid0 partition giving me 80gigs for OS/Apps. A 4 drive raid0 is just fast. The remainder of the space I'll use as a raid5 to have stripping and parity. It won't be as fast as the raid0 but it will be much faster than any raptor out there. I also plugged in an old 80gb IDE drive to do nightly backups to for some piece of mind on the raid0 part. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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