4x Cheetah 10,000RPM in Raid 0 (how fast?)

[pederson_76]

Ok, this is 2 WD Caviar Blue 640gb in raid 0(64 stripe size): hdtune read benchmark
min=3.5 mb/s
max=213.8 mb/s
avg=153.9 mb/s
access time=12.5 ms

 

[pederson_76]

Private deal? Otherways share the details please!

I sent you a pm

 

[janas19]

FWIW I've never had a Raptor or Cheetah die on me. The last dino drives to be evicted from my house were a set of Raptors over 7 years old, and are probably the worst abused (WoW, running 24 7, etc) and still running like new. In fact it still has the original XP install from when I built it, and still boots to desktop in about 8 seconds flat with the drives going dead silent idle the moment the taskbar pops up.

Damn.

Hey, have you ever tried experimenting with any sound-deadening foam on those drives?

 

[Gillbot]

I always wanted a 15K cheetah

But its such a beautiful sound. Especially listening to them spin down for the 10 mins following a shutdown. And the loud running on cereal sound the servos make when completing a defrag in less than 60 seconds Sometimes I swear my computer was swaying from the momentum of those armatures flying around so hard.

haha, no sound doesn't bother me. i can get 4 of them for $60.

I had a set of 15k SAS drives in Raid0 and when I switched to SSDs I was disappointed. I lost a lot of space on the SSDs and didn't gain much speed, though they were a little faster. I think I got caught up in the hype of SSDs though. Unfortunately as soon as I got the SSDs in I sold the SAS setup. I wish I would have kept it so I could switch back.

A set of good quality SAS drives in Raid0 will give very good performance and storage space vs. SSDs IMHO of course. I think they are a good balance between the high cost and the lower capacity of SSDs. The problem lies in the SAS controllers since they can be costly which may negate the savings over SSDs. If you can get your hands on a good controller for a reasonable cost, it may be something to try.

 

[exdeath]

I had a set of 15k SAS drives in Raid0 and when I switched to SSDs I was disappointed. I lost a lot of space on the SSDs and didn't gain much speed, though they were a little faster. I think I got caught up in the hype of SSDs though. Unfortunately as soon as I got the SSDs in I sold the SAS setup. I wish I would have kept it so I could switch back.

A set of good quality SAS drives in Raid0 will give very good performance and storage space vs. SSDs IMHO of course. I think they are a good balance between the high cost and the lower capacity of SSDs. The problem lies in the SAS controllers since they can be costly which may negate the savings over SSDs. If you can get your hands on a good controller for a reasonable cost, it may be something to try.

What generation SSD? The first SSDs to hit the market were pretty horrible. A current third generation SATA 6G SSD should blow away your SAS drives no contest.

IMO SSDs were not really viable until this last generation or two where all the trim, wear leveling, stuttering, locking up, etc bugs have finally been resolved.

Then again I've said it before: though SSD are technically faster, if you are already coming from fast HDD array of 10-15k drives, your perception of improvement won't be as nearly as great as someone coming from a Compaq Presario with a Quantum Bigfoot.

Just like people with high end CRTs aren't all that impressed with LCD, only the people coming from 14" 60 hz blurry monitors with convergeance off by half an inch were really floored. The rest of us with FD Trinitrons were like "welcome to the club 10 years too late".

 

[groberts101]

dead serious here.. don't waste your time on a setup like that.

at first I thought exdeath may be full of poo(no offense intended here bud.. just adding the usual salt to forum posting is all + the comment about "near SSD performance threw me off a bit too at first).. but then after he spelled out the limitations in a bit more detail.. he appears to be experienced enough to give competent advice.

That being said.. I have 4 x 15k cheetah drives in R0 and aside from massive burst speeds?(until cache runs out anyways).. it's really all about reduced latency and I/O performance for those types of drives.

Fact is.. SSD's will smoke those older drives in every way besides capacity these days. In fact.. I've tested faster single SSD compared to as many as 8 of these types of drives(my buds have 12 drive arrays as well) and aside from sequential R/W?(which is like near silliness to consider as an important metric for an OS volume).. not even in the same ballpark.

Plus there's the fact that latency gets amplified as the array gets wider with more drives added. Just the price we pay for magnetic record player tech we call HDD and the overhead they add on the hardware they're attached to.

Again.. no offense intended to exdeath.. and just calling it like I see it from much raid experience.. onboard and off.

 

[zuffy]

Maybe when I get a chance I will do the setup again and run some benchmarks. I configured an HP Proliant DL360 G7 with 2 x 2.66GHz (don't remember 4 or 6 cores), 72GB RAM with 4 x 146GB 15k SAS drives in RAID 0. Don't remember which Smartarray controller now but it has the 1GB cache. For regular usage, SSD will win. Everything is just more snappy with a SSD. I didn't create another RAID to test the sequential and it's pointless to copy over the network.

 

[exdeath]

dead serious here.. don't waste your time on a setup like that.

at first I thought exdeath may be full of poo(no offense intended here bud.. just adding the usual salt to forum posting is all + the comment about "near SSD performance threw me off a bit too at first).. but then after he spelled out the limitations in a bit more detail.. he appears to be experienced enough to give competent advice.

That being said.. I have 4 x 15k cheetah drives in R0 and aside from massive burst speeds?(until cache runs out anyways).. it's really all about reduced latency and I/O performance for those types of drives.

Fact is.. SSD's will smoke those older drives in every way besides capacity these days. In fact.. I've tested faster single SSD compared to as many as 8 of these types of drives(my buds have 12 drive arrays as well) and aside from sequential R/W?(which is like near silliness to consider as an important metric for an OS volume).. not even in the same ballpark.

Plus there's the fact that latency gets amplified as the array gets wider with more drives added. Just the price we pay for magnetic record player tech we call HDD and the overhead they add on the hardware they're attached to.

Again.. no offense intended to exdeath.. and just calling it like I see it from much raid experience.. onboard and off.

Of course we know SSD is superior on paper.

For the average user that measures perceived performance based on boot time and how long eBay takes to come up on IE first launch, coming from a Cheetah/Raptor RAID that already boots in 8 seconds to SSD is going to be disappointing compared to someone coming from an eMachine with a $30 HDD that has never experienced less than 2 minute boots before.

"SSD like performance" from Cheetah/Raptor RAID is relative... how fast a Lamborghini feels to you depends if you previously drove a Corvette or a Corolla.

 

[Gillbot]

What generation SSD? The first SSDs to hit the market were pretty horrible. A current third generation SATA 6G SSD should blow away your SAS drives no contest.

IMO SSDs were not really viable until this last generation or two where all the trim, wear leveling, stuttering, locking up, etc bugs have finally been resolved.

Then again I've said it before: though SSD are technically faster, if you are already coming from fast HDD array of 10-15k drives, your perception of improvement won't be as nearly as great as someone coming from a Compaq Presario with a Quantum Bigfoot.

Just like people with high end CRTs aren't all that impressed with LCD, only the people coming from 14" 60 hz blurry monitors with convergeance off by half an inch were really floored. The rest of us with FD Trinitrons were like "welcome to the club 10 years too late".

Of course we know SSD is superior on paper.

For the average user that measures perceived performance based on boot time and how long eBay takes to come up on IE first launch, coming from a Cheetah/Raptor RAID that already boots in 8 seconds to SSD is going to be disappointing compared to someone coming from an eMachine with a $30 HDD that has never experienced less than 2 minute boots before.

"SSD like performance" from Cheetah/Raptor RAID is relative... how fast a Lamborghini feels to you depends if you previously drove a Corvette or a Corolla.

They were Intel but I don't recall what model. Trust me, they were plenty fast, but overall performance gains in everything I did were not enough to justify the extra cost vs. loss of storage space FOR ME.

 

[bryanW1995]

Even the 1st gen intels were awesome. However, their sustained read/write has never been that great (other than 510 series obviously), so if you were doing a lot of those especially then it's easy to see how you would have been disappointed.

 

[groberts101]

agreed on the last couple of points made by exdeath and bryan. What really gets me is the way users correlate the sequential write speeds of said arrangement to an SSD when the typical workflow of an OS based volume is not going to be living in that workflow for extended periods of time anyways.

It's like guys that overcam an engine.. sure the engine's peak power goes up.. but the average torque curve numbers go down where we typically rpm the engine 70-90% of the time and actually hurts overall performance. Maybe not the best analogy.. since IOPS go up with any raid.. but is just a quick off the top car analogy to sum up what people expect from hhuge sequential performance on an OS volume.

The other thing I see far too often is people talking about raided HDD having greater performance than single SSD's but mention nothing about having another capable raid array that can be used to even take advantage of the OS volume's huge sequential potential. Should be pretty obvious that we can't utilize those tall sequentials if we can't read/write from/to another volume with the same matched performance. Bottlenecks abound for more systems than most care to admit.

In fact.. I didn't see huge advantages to raided OS volumes until I got a 6 drive raid array running off a card to ever fully leverage my OS's 6 drive array. I tell the ones who don't really know what they're missing to set up a 4 gig ramdisk to read/write from/to the raid array and take note of the speeds. Don't look away or blink though cause that data flys when it's matched up to a capable volume with equal or greater performance. Is like having a REvo-drive and not having raided storage to ever see transfer speeds that the Revo is capable of. Seems like kind of a waste for some of the money spent.. at least until you get the data used swapped over to and stored natively on the Revo.

Matching storage to OS volumes is the key to true performance, IMHO. Course.. usage models will decide if that performance will ever be used to the ful extent/or even needed and overkill is quite common for many typical surfing/gaming rigs. Speed is like beauty.. it truly is in the eye of the beholder. To each his own, I guess.

 

[Shmee]

Before the SSD craze, I was thinking of getting a good raid card and some 15K rpm seagate cheetahs. But they were way to expensive, and now I can just use good SSD's (which are coming down in price) and my Caviar Black for storage, which is still quite fast and plenty of space for me as well.

 

[pederson_76]

Looks like I will just stick with my current drive and start saving/waiting. Thanks a lot for the info guys. Saved me lots of future frustration.

 

[eBauer]

Just like people with high end CRTs aren't all that impressed with LCD, only the people coming from 14" 60 hz blurry monitors with convergeance off by half an inch were really floored. The rest of us with FD Trinitrons were like "welcome to the club 10 years too late".

QFT - Still using a Trinitron to this day.

 

[Rifter]

They are fast, but if you are going to cripple it with a PCI slot then its a waste of time. You are going to need either a PCI-X slot or PCIe slot to provide enough bandwidth to make this a worthwile investment. Otherwise just buy a SSD.

 

[pederson_76]

In the meantime, if I find 2 raptor drives for cheap I may just try running them in a raid 0 for fun :biggrin:

 

[DirkGently1]

No matter how fast the spinners are, or how many you have in an array, the access times and random read/writes are going to suck balls compared to even the lowliest SSD.

Then there's the horrible noise.

 

[groberts101]

that's true. But for the storage speeds/needs we require to keep up with todays SSD's?(especially those with raided SSD's).. it's a necessary evil. Plus..storage rarely needs tons of random access performance to see the bulk of the gain in transfer performance.

As for the noise?.. well,.. that's a perspective thing as I love the sound of my 8 drive array spooling up to deliver near 1 gig sequentials to my SSD array. It stalls for a second or two while the heads seek out the data and then.. BAM.. 5 gigs flies across from one volume to another in mere seconds.

Of course I can't wait to have sufficiently sized raided SSD storage.. but until then?.. HDD will have to do.

 

[Gillbot]

No matter how fast the spinners are, or how many you have in an array, the access times and random read/writes are going to suck balls compared to even the lowliest SSD.

Then there's the horrible noise.

I personally enjoyed the sound of a 15k drive myself.

 

[groberts101]

I personally enjoyed the sound of a 15k drive myself.

I agree completely. I don't boot up my older workstation as much any more.. but 4 of those 15k drives in R0 sounds like a mini-turbo when they rev up all the way.

Is definately a perspective thing.

 

[Gillbot]

I agree completely. I don't boot up my older workstation as much any more.. but 4 of those 15k drives in R0 sounds like a mini-turbo when they rev up all the way.

Is definately a perspective thing.

The deafening silence of SSD's is more annoying to me.

 

[exdeath]

I enjoyed the sounds of Raptor/Cheetah drives. The 2 minutes they take winding down back into audible RPM before they return to 0 RPM when powering down, the sound of hastily ripping burlap indicating a large very powerful sub 4 ms actuator that doesn't put up with any "green" crap, etc.

To me those sounds have always been synonymous with "not slow".

Compare to the sound of a crap drive seeking: the sound of a styrofoam ball being lazily drug through gravel an 1 mile per hour.

Only thing not to like about 15K RAID is the 10 minute POST, waiting for the controller to init and self test, cache check, enumerate SCSI chain, wait for all drives to spin up and sync rotation index, etc. Oh and the 15 foot terminated LVD cables coiled up inside the PC when you only use 2 positions per channel. Main reason I went to Raptors and SATA...

 

[Seven]

I've no idea how one can actually enjoy the sound of raptors or cheetahs. I could hear the raptor in my sleeping room while the actual PC is being in another room. But I finally got sick of the noise and got a SSD instead and never looked back.

Cheetahs don't really make sense anymore unless you own a controller. The controller is expensive and for the price you can build a blazing SSD setup that would kill the Cheetahs in the dust.

 

[pederson_76]

The deafening silence of SSD's is more annoying to me.

LOL! :biggrin:

 

[Johnny Doe]

SSD's have nearly zero access time but SCSI is no slouch either. That interface platform is built for high input/output situations, those controllers and drives handle random access better than Raptors. It's not just the 10.000 RPM, you can use a SCSI while doing a data transfer of many small files, and not slow down. Add the reliability of them over SSD's or regular HDD's, and the fact that you can get four of them for $60 makes it a really sweet deal.

Though, keep in mind that you need to know a little of your way to put them in RAID. Both sides of SCSI need termination (you need to ensure this on your hardware), and pin layout needs to be the same between the controller and the drives (or you need to use a converter). You also have to set up RAID via the controller's inferface, which is usually accessed after POST or via a DOS panel in Windows; after installing the drivers.