Harddrive Advice.. fast drives?

[TheGizmo]

I'm trying to figure out what harddrive would be the fastest for a desktop, without concern of cost.. these 3 are the ones that really appeal to me:

1.) Two 60gb ATA133 7200 Maxtor's (Liquid bearing) in RAID 0.

2.) One 120JB (WD 120gb 8mb cache) alone

3.) One 9gb 10,000rpm U160 SCSI drive (Atlas IV probably).

I would think the SCSI drive would be quickest, and thats what I have right now.. but I've read some 120JB reviews and they beat some 10K rpm drives.. or is there anything else faster in these type of categories? (Obviously not 4 SCSI drives in RAID 5 or something like that.. which is out of my league)

Let me know what you guys think, thanks.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

fastest would be a 15k drive like the seagate cheetah 36LP or fujitsu MAM (sp?) drives.

second best would be probably 10K atlas III

(these are all scsi)

 

[BeefcakeVA]

If you want max speed and cost isn't an issue, I'd run two WD 120JBs in a RAID 0 config. SCSI is nice but the "bang for the buck" is lacking unless you are building a server.

 

[TheGizmo]

thanks for replying guys with that being said.. Bing Bong said 15k, Beefcake said two WD's.. which do you guys think would be faster of those two?

 

[TonyB]

the fastest hard drive now to my knowledge is the seagate cheetah 36-LP 15k drive. you can check storagereview.com for the specs and benchmarks i think its someting like 3.6ms access times? if you want to wait, the next generation drive called cheetah 15.3k is comming out, the ".3" is suppose to mean its 3rd generation, and its suppose to be faster from what ive heard.

 

[pillage2001]

I would go for two JBs for space and speed.

A 73Gb 15RPM drive would prolly suck you dry. That being said, are there any 15k 73Gb drives??

 

[mastertech01]

I believe that 3rd Gen 15K is a 73GB drive... prolly about 1200.00 too..

I got 4 36LP in Raid 0. I just cant use 240GB of IDE drives, and one 73GB SCSI would not perform as well as 4 18's in Raid 0. If one were to actually build a data base of 240GB IDE, Id sure hate to wait out a defrag..

 

[TheGizmo]

I think this is what I'm going to do.. scrap the entire 120JB idea.. never really liked WD anyway, I already have two 80gb ATA133 7200 Liquid bearing drives heres, have those in RAID0 (as storage). Then for the OS I will get a Cheetah 15K 18GB (or 9gb, do they make 9gb 15k? ). I looked at the fugitsu 15K drive as well, but the seagate pretty much rips it up. So this is what it is:

Storage: Two 80GB Maxtor ATA133 Liquid Bearing in RAID 0 (Fastrakk 133)
OS : Seagate Cheetah 15K 18GB U160 on an Adaptec 29160 controller

Let me know what you guys think.

 

[mastertech01]

ID say you would be quite satisfied with that setup. As far as I know, there are no 9GB 36LP drives, but it wouldnt be much cheaper anyway.

My 4 36LP SCA drives were 700.00 shipped Fedex off the forums, slightly used (3hours of benchmarking) If you arent planning on having the same setup for 3 years or more, a slighly used setup like this can amount to substantial cost savings.

 

[TheGizmo]

Yea, I'll definately be browsing the forums tonight for a 15k cheetah, thanks for the help everyone I think I've finally made up my mind with what I said earlier

 

[ledzepp98]

i concur with your final opinion... i have something similar:
18gig x15-36LP (9gig doesn't exist) for my system drive
100gig western digital and 120gig western digital drives, both 7200rpm and for storage/backup
30gig maxtor 7200rpm for backup

the only thing i wouldn't do is use raid0 for storage or backup. if you use programs that really need the faster transfer rates that's one thing, but the added risk is in my opinion not worth it if you are just storing music or videos.