Storage array: Bare drives, SS, RAID, SSD, or other?

[Viceroy]

Obviously the basic hierarchy would go SSD(Intel x25-m; OCZ) > 10k(Velociraptor) > 7.2k(Spinpoint F3; Caviar Black; Barracuda) > 5.4k(Caviar Green), but I am curious to see the relative performance of these drives when short-stroked or put into a RAID array so that I can better decide which combination of storage devices would be of the greatest benefit to me, with price and hassle of course factored in. General ideas are welcome, but I believe what would help me the most are benchmarks and numbers and graphs.

Thanks.

[jim]

At the end of the day, graphs are all well and good but it's not really the best way to compare them in my opinion.

What you'll probably find out is that if you pick fast hard drives and mess around with them in RAID configs and short stroke and so on is that you'll be able to match the sequential transfer speeds of an SSD. In other words, if you've got a 2GB file that's in one big lump, they'll match each other in performance.

However, that's not typical usage, or at least it's only typical when we're talking about media storage or backups, with large files that just need to be streamed or transferred - and in that instance you wouldn't consider an SSD, so we'll count that out.

What's more interesting is that an SSD can move to a different location on the hard drive in 0.1ms, compared to a hard drive which will take around 5-10ms (roughly speaking, this is all off the top of my head). So when you're using a PC for, say, booting an OS, it will be looking for files all over the drive - some from the windows install, perhaps a couple of applications you've got installed somewhere, the odd config file, which are all over the place. It might load them as the same speed, but it finds them so much quicker that you don't get the same lag you get with a hard drive.

My gut reaction with all of this is:

If you want a fast OS, get an SSD. If that's too expensive, then perhaps you'd benefit from a velociraptor, but I'd rather get a standard 7200rpm HD with only one platter (like my Spinpoint F1 320GB) and save up for when an SSD becomes more appropriate.

For data storage, I'd use the GP drives because low power, low noise, low temperatures are more important to me than high speeds when I'm just using them occasionally to dump large files onto.

All that RAID/short stroking stuff is a nice idea, but I think it just overcomplicates matters more often than not - at the end of the day, yes four F3 drives in RAID 0 will be blindingly quick in HDTach and so on, but would you notice the speed in everyday usage? Probably not - when are you likely to transfer a massive file from one RAID 0 array to another of similar strength that would show that speed? Transfer speeds really aren't everything, although sometimes it seems that that's all people want to talk about.

[Champman99]

I like Raid5 for storage. 3*Samsung 1TB F3s in Raid5 thats my next purchase I hope.

Security and Speed.

For my primary OS I will be using just an X25-M g2 on its own, no fancy tricks. Although I think the way intel designed the drive I think its actually a very complicated RAID system inside the drive itself between individual memory chips.