TCQ and raptors/WD2500KS-VS-6V250F0

[MillingMan]

Well, first off I was wondering if I move my Raptors off of my NF3 and put them on a raid card suporting TCQ will there be a performance diferance?


Next, I am in need of 2 Hard drives. I have 2 options. The Maxtor has Comand Quening, The Western digital doent mention it. Which drive?

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=133

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6V250F0 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/...data_sheet.pdf

[dave87]

I've got 3 DiamondMax drives - one 9 and two 10s, and had no problems with them so far (about 2-3 years old). With the NCQ I dont know how much of a difference it will make, but tbh, unless you pay decent money for a raid card, the difference will be minimal, and probably only shown in benchmarks, not in real world usage.

Just asking, is there any reason for going for 250Gb disks? the 300s arent much more, so might be worth considering?

Dave

[MillingMan]

I've got 3 DiamondMax drives - one 9 and two 10s, and had no problems with them so far (about 2-3 years old). With the NCQ I dont know how much of a difference it will make, but tbh, unless you pay decent money for a raid card, the difference will be minimal, and probably only shown in benchmarks, not in real world usage.

Just asking, is there any reason for going for 250Gb disks? the 300s arent much more, so might be worth considering?

Dave

250's = $95
320's = $135

It's hard to decide. But I do need 500+ Gigs of new storage in JOBD Config. I know the WD are slightly faster. And I do apreciate there looks but theres a high failure rate! So I cant decide...

Edit: Also is the Nforce 3 raid hardware based or software? Could I improve with a raid card?

[MillingMan]

Any one?!?!


Is Nforce 3 a true hardware based raid?

[arthurleung]

Any one?!?!


Is Nforce 3 a true hardware based raid?

No it is not hardware based. And SATA300 is not anywhere better than SATA150, so you could save the money buying SATA150 drives.

Depends on what you're going to use the drives for, NCQ have negetive effect on single-user performance (and only effective at very high load). For most use NCQ is just a marketing thing to make user buy the product. I turn off NCQ for all my drives because my system became so unresponsive when NCQ is turned on. It did speed up transfer but it give priority (unintentional) to higher load transfers. For example I copy some files from system drive to another drive, my mouse would lag and programs would not response because the system could not read files from system disk due to the file transfer having a higher priority (NCQ).

[kalniel]

Above post is correct. NCQ (and TCQ) vastly help the speed of server operations where you have several users requesting data at once off the same hard drive. In a single usage senario it actually slows things down.

[MillingMan]

No it is not hardware based. And SATA300 is not anywhere better than SATA150, so you could save the money buying SATA150 drives.

WHat is HW based? I need a controler for my raptors. Perferably cheap at say $50- $75. Also how can I tell if a controler is a true hardware raid?

And finally yesterday I lost a 200 gig HD. It will run for 10 mins after boot and then spin and stop. all i hear is a bunch of contacts. I need a replacement fast so I went with 2 Western Dig. 250 Gigs each sata2 and a raid card. heres the items I bought.


CHEAP raid card http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16815161012 (not HW I am shure)

SATA2 cables http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16812207001

HDD's http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16822144701

[arthurleung]

WHat is HW based? I need a controler for my raptors. Perferably cheap at say $50- $75. Also how can I tell if a controler is a true hardware raid?

And finally yesterday I lost a 200 gig HD. It will run for 10 mins after boot and then spin and stop. all i hear is a bunch of contacts. I need a replacement fast so I went with 2 Western Dig. 250 Gigs each sata2 and a raid card. heres the items I bought.


CHEAP raid card http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16815161012 (not HW I am shure)

SATA2 cables http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16812207001

HDD's http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16822144701

Basically anything less than $300 is not hardware based. Promise controllers are semi-hardware based, but the performance is not very good.

Hardware raid card manufacturers includes LSI, Intel (LSI OEM), Areca, Adaptec, 3Ware, and a couple of smaller one. You could try XFX's Revo and thats hardware based too. And comparatively cheap.
Hardware based mean they have their own processor to calculate checksum/parity (RAID5/6 only) for incoming data and write to the disks. For software based, the software tell the CPU to do the parity calculation. Hardware based use a lot less CPU so the CPU can do other more "useful" things. While software based theoretically could be faster due to the CPU being faster. But for RAID0/1/10 it is not that much of an issue because it doesn't eat that much CPU to do the job unlike RAID5/6.

Regarding to speed, since I assume you're using NF3, your hdd speed will be max-ed at about 115MB/s due to PCI bus saturation. It would be faster if you plug it on your NF3's SATA ports.

[dureth]

Basically if your not going to be running a server that deals with many user requests at once then TCQ/NCQ and hardware level RAID are not worth worrying about.