New hard disc decisions –

[dgr]

Hello
My 120gb ibm hard disc is either dead or will be dead until I can find someone to solder it. Which means that as I need more than my current WD 7200rpm 8mb 120gb hard disc, I need to buy more.

I was thinking of taking this opportunity to move to sata raid. I have an nforce2 chipset MB (see sig), which I believe allows me to use sata/ide adaptors to use 2 ide drives (ntsf, programs) in raid array. This would allow me to use my 2 remaining ide controllers to control another hard disc (fat32, data storage, and linux) and another drive in the future.
I don’t want sata hard discs as they are too expensive, and too immature. I want ide drives with sata adaptors… (I think?)
The question is, which drives to get? Which is the most effective method?
Option 1 – 2 more drives, say 120gb 8mb cache maxtor9s. i.e. fast.

Option 2 – 2 more drives, 1 120gb WD to match my existing one, to go in the raid array with my WD and another, smaller, cheaper hard disc to use as my linux drive. N.b. this would require the raid array to be split between ntfs and fat32 so linux can read the mp3s / videos on the raid array.

Option 3 – forget about raid, just one more, slower, bigger hard disc (fat32) for backup and linux.

Any suggestions? What is the real world performance increase in RAID?

Think games and video / audio / picture editing

dgr

[BlackSheep]

Get a nice Maxtor DM Plus 9 SATA 120GB - then you don't have to worry about the adapter - you still need a SATA power adapter though if your PSU doesn't have them ....

Tasty SATA drives for IDE prices

[Stoo]

You really won't have any problems with SATA, and your read/write performance will be a lot better, you'll definately notice the difference

[dgr]

so if i do get a maxtor DM9 SATA, should i get 1 or 2 and raid em?

dgr

[Stoo]

yep, 2 and stuff them together in raid 0

[BlackSheep]

Originally posted by dgr
so if i do get a maxtor DM9 SATA, should i get 1 or 2 and raid em?

dgr

you might as well take advantage of it ... seeing as you get it for free on that mobo ... and as you said all you need to do then is partition is accordingly NTFS/FAT32 so that linux and wind0ze can both use it (shared on the fat32 partition).

[dgr]

at a grand price of £200

well for 384gb of hard disc space it won't be bad (or 402gb if i can get the ibm working again)

dgr

[BlackSheep]

Originally posted by dgr
at a grand price of £200

well for 384gb of hard disc space it won't be bad (or 402gb if i can get the ibm working again)

dgr

yer very nice indeed

[Stoo]

then you'll need a faster adsl connection to fill them up...

[nichomach]

On the power adapter thingy, I just upped to an 80GB Maxtor DM+ 9 and although it has an SATA power connector, it also sports a conventional molex type 4-pin power connector which is what mine's running off now - no need for SATA power connector, nice one Maxtor (I KNEW there was a reason I liked them ).

[spikegifted]

Go on!! Blow you wad... Get yourself a SCSI U320 controller and a Seagate Cheetah 15.3 drive for OS and apps and a Maxtor / Fijitsu / Hitachi / WD 10K drive for storage!! It will cost you a bundle to start with, but you'd be thanking yourself in the months and years ahead...

[Stoo]

Well, that's fine if you don't want much storage space

[spikegifted]

Originally posted by Stoo
Well, that's fine if you don't want much storage space

Well... Yea, I agree to a certain extent. But the beauty of SCSI is that you can have up to 15 devices on one channel of your controller... The sweet spot for 10K devices is the 36GB drives which are going at around £130 - that's about the same as the WD Raptor.

[Stoo]

Yeah, but 15 drives in one box? That'll drive you nuts with the noise if it doesn't rattle itself across the room..

If you want large amounts of storage on your home pc/workstation, the only reasonable way is ide/sata.

[spikegifted]

Hehe... I'm not suggesting that you've 15 drives in one rig, but I was merely suggesting the expandibility of SCSI vs. IDE/S-ATA. (However, I do have 8 HDDs and 3 optical drives in my main rig... for details, see this page. )

[BlackSheep]

Originally posted by spikegifted
Go on!! Blow you wad... Get yourself a SCSI U320 controller and a Seagate Cheetah 15.3 drive for OS and apps and a Maxtor / Fijitsu / Hitachi / WD 10K drive for storage!! It will cost you a bundle to start with, but you'd be thanking yourself in the months and years ahead...

It would have to be an awful lot of SCSI Drives to compare with the storage space he's going to get with SATA - and the performance difference for most purposes is negligible - SCSI really shows its edge with lots of smaller files and loading games, not so much with copying larger files (that in most cases will probably come via LAN/WAN neway)

... even if you are using them as you are, spike, for rendering ... the bottleneck is in the rendering process itself not the actual copying of output to disk

SCSI just can't realistically compete for storage space.