Hard Drive to buy?

[ERU]

I already have a 'WD2000JD 200GB Serial ATA150 7200rpm 8mb Cache' formatted to 166GB but am thinking of getting a FAST bootup drive too.

Whats the best cost effective solution?
Should i go for a Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA 8mb Cache or is it worth trying out the cheaper
Western Digital 36.7Gb Raptor SATA 8mb Cache?
Does anyone know of some raid 1 or 0 config i could use with other drives that might be just as good and/or cheaper? What peolple thoughts on this?

[zaphod]

The WD raptors are a great hard disk and very fast. If it was me i'd buy another 200Gb WD disk and set up a raid0. If you do buy a raptor buy a 74Gig one. They are more than just a larger disk, they have other features such as command queing that makes them faster.

[ERU]

I dont want to set up Raid 0 as i mainly keep the other drive/partition as a backup.

[zaphod]

If you have the cash then a Raptor 74 Gb is probable the best buy. And if you have loads of cash buy 2x !!!!!

[ERU]

I am thinking of putting x2 of these in Raid 0 ------------> Maxtor 6B200P0 Diamondmax 10 200Gb 7200rpm ATA133 8mb Cache £64.69 inc VAT but would like to stick with SATA ones.

The 74GB Raptors just seem alot of ££s for what they are...

[aidanjt]

the 74Gb Raptors have slightly higher density than the 32Gb, so it yeilds a higher performance, I have two and its the best use of money I've made to date. SCSI performance for half the price.

[pudds]

I am thinking of putting x2 of these in Raid 0 ------------> Maxtor 6B200P0 Diamondmax 10 200Gb 7200rpm ATA133 8mb Cache £64.69 inc VAT but would like to stick with SATA ones.

The 74GB Raptors just seem alot of ££s for what they are...

Id go for 2 250GB derives, they have a 16mb cache which should increase performance a bit.
I don't think 74GB raptors are worth the money either.
I would need 17 of them to match the storage i have now. Per MB there 2.5 times as expensive, that isn't reflected in the performance.

[aidanjt]

pudds, Raptors are based on SCSI mechanical technology, they are engineered to be fast and reliable, not cheap. my two raptors cream any other ATA/SATA disks on the market, you'll only aprechiate it if you own it.

*edit* this acctually reminds of of the SCSI vs. IDE arguments of old, the difference is SCSI systems were a LOT more expensive, and still are. And personally if i had the cash i would still go for SCSI in a heartbeat.

[Raggy]

I've been doing a lot of homework on HDD technology my advice is for you to do the same. And important aspect is to know what your PC is going to be doing most of the time, different jobs means spending more or less on certain parts (I’m sure your aware of this, I just like to generalize for those who may not).
I started a thread not to long ago asking about hard drives and that link about was given to me by OiD, the info is great.

[pudds]

pudds, Raptors are based on SCSI mechanical technology, they are engineered to be fast and reliable, not cheap. my two raptors cream any other ATA/SATA disks on the market, you'll only aprechiate it if you own it.

*edit* this acctually reminds of of the SCSI vs. IDE arguments of old, the difference is SCSI systems were a LOT more expensive, and still are. And personally if i had the cash i would still go for SCSI in a heartbeat.

If thats true then i take it back but ive read nowhere that its based on scsi technology. Only difference i see is an increased spindle speed and MTBF

[aidanjt]

the mechanical aspects are taken from SCSI drives, physically speaking its no different from a SCSI drive, thus the higher spindle speed and MTBF, the interface is still SATA.

[Taz]

I should be getting my two 74GB Raptors delivered from Scan today. I was originally planning on setting them up in a RAID 0 configuration. However, after reading an article on AnandTech, it seems that there is very little real-world performance gain to be had (2-3%).

Hence, i'll probably just set them up as two standalone drives, unless someone on here can convince me otherwise.

My understanding is that many onboard RAID drivers use up a few percent of CPU (10%) to implement the striping algorithm. That is performance that would be more useful for applications/games themselves. This was another reason I was not going to do RAID 0.

[BlueMagician]

Don't know if you've been following my thread over the last few days, 'ANOTHER drive configuration thread', but we touched on RAID0/5 setups there.

I agree with your 'performance hit' remark of any 'onboard' RAID solution, as I wrote almost exactly the same as you a few days ago.. lol:

...And, on a slightly different note, should I be worried about CPU usage of a RAID-0 solution? I've read some reviews that favour the NForce4 chipset over the SiliconImage for throughput, but at the expense of up to 5% CPU loading - 5% that is perhaps better put towards framerates and AI calculations in my gaming...?...

I just read the Anandtech RAID0 Raptor test, and I think I've convinced myself not to RAID0.

I think I've made the decision to go two 74GB Raptors (NOT in RAID), and probably one or two Maxtor DiamondMax10's. Whether I go for the 200GB 8mb, or the 300GB 16mb DM10's has yet to be decided.


S.

[Taz]

I didn't follow the other thread. At least we concur! I don't have high disk space requirements. I'm currently using a laptop with a 30GB drive and i've only used 12GB with all of my apps loaded onto it. I've got and external 120GB USB drive to store CD-ROM images, utilities, pictures, etc., and i've only used 4GB! Hence, I went for 2 x 74GB Raptors.

I tend to keep my drives extremely 'clean', hence the low amount of disk space used. I use Active@ ZDelete Auto-Cleaner to clean up and wipe my drives on a regular basis and Executive Software Diskeeper to defrag them.

[aidanjt]

I should be getting my two 74GB Raptors delivered from Scan today. I was originally planning on setting them up in a RAID 0 configuration. However, after reading an article on AnandTech, it seems that there is very little real-world performance gain to be had (2-3%).

...

My understanding is that many onboard RAID drivers use up a few percent of CPU (10%) to implement the striping algorithm. That is performance that would be more useful for applications/games themselves. This was another reason I was not going to do RAID 0.

It depends on your application, I have two 74Gb Raptors stripped and it puts everything else to shame, loading games and video encoding for eg would yeild higher noticeable performance gains. For server application where file throughput is important for file and database transactions would also show. 'real-world' performance is a few vague line to look at, since people do many different things in the 'real-world'.

As for CPU utilisation, striping isn't that much hard work, and this isn't the fault of RAID technology, its the 'soft' controllers that are making the CPU decide which disk to put what where. I've had noticeable increese in gaming performance overall, loading times especially have increesed by at least 40% over my 2xATA133 RAID 0 configureation. I tested this with Sanrda file system benchmark with bypassing windows file cache disabled, and the system only used about 4% avg. cpu time.. now consider that all ide and sata drives use up at least some cpu time for disk i/o.. that isn't bad, if i wanted to do better i could go for an Adaptec host sata raid card, but i don't see this as much of a problem.

[rmaciag]

This is what I have done recently !
I had no cash but I got a new credit card with 0% interest till May.
Here we go - 2x 74GB Raptors in RAID0 !
I wish I could find out how fast they are.
Can anybody help me to find the appropriate benchmarking tools ? Please ....

Kind Regards

Robert