master hard drive

[wilsonian]

or more to the point the primary boot partion, what are you using to store your windows directory?

at the moment i have a storage issue (lots of hard drives non big enough). i'm running a stripped RAID array with 2 80Gb Maxtor 8mb hard drives. what i'm looking at doing is using the two hard drives as storage and get a smaller fast setup (as out of the 150Gb RAID i use about 25-30 GB)

i've been looking at the following

SCSI setup with a 30-odd gig hard drive

single SATA drive - 80Gb

or two 40GB hard drives on a stripped RAID array.


could i have your thoughts on both which setup you would have and the models of the parts

thanks guys!

[aeronic]

the SCSI setup will be faster - and hence load windows (or OS of choice) about 3seconds faster
personally i would go for a single SATA, just cos its easier and doesnt mean messing around with raid for the boot partition.

[Doctor.Bob]

Theoretically a scsi setup will be faster. However the bottleneck whatever yo go for will be the PCI bus so you may not get all the performance out of scsi that it promises on paper.

What mobo do you have?

A single large SATA drive might be the best choice - avoiding the increased risk of a drive failure with striped RAID.

[SilentDeath]

technicly pata is just as fast as sata becasue

1) pci bus bottleneck = 133mb/s
2) drives arnt that fast anyway, only achiving that speed in bursts

there are these resons to get sata

1) much less cpu utilisation - hdd usage wont slow down otherstuff, but its not THAT noticable anyway unless its a server with hdd going constantly.
2) smaller cables, new (good) technology that will die if noone buys the drives
3) as its new tech, manufacturers are using this as an excuse to bring out almost scsi level drives, for example the WD raptors, which will help sata become more used, apposed to pata.

id get single drive, due to the risk (and cost, imo it outweighs the performance)

i dont c the point in paying extra so windows can load 3 seconds faster, and raptor and scsi drives are optimised for lots of random file access, not large files, so a sata maxtor dmp9 might outperfrom a scsi 10k drive for file transfer speed.

(ive never owned a sata or scsi drive) currently using maxtors, d740x 40gb as boot on ide1m, dvd-rw on ide2m, cd on ide2s, and a 120gb pata dmp9 using sata converter.

[Lexeus]

what is Pata ? I thought it was just an IDE to SATA adaptor or sometihng, but sounds like i got the wrong idea ....

[perryh73]

Go for three fast drives mirrored and striped!!!

[Axion]

ide basically is pata (parrallel ata)

[tfboy]

Originally posted by perryh73
Go for three fast drives mirrored and striped!!!

I maybe completely wrong, but how can you do that? I thought you need 4 drives to have a raid 0+1

Personally, I'd go for the single sata drive. Raid is great, but if ever you have a problem or change mobo or something, getting your raid array to work is a lot trickier than just plugging in a sata drive into any sata-equipped pc.

Also, it's fast enough for most purposes and theoretically, it's less risky than having 2 drives striped (only one needs to go down to lose all your data).

Just my two p's worth