Raid with WD "special edition" drives

[EricCrunk]

I have 2 of the 120 gig drives coming to me in a few days, I was wondering if any of you currently have them in raid 0. I'm curious on all of the models seeing as speed difference is minimal between them. I've only found one person that put them into raid so far and the benchmarks were impressive though I would like some personal input from you guys.

 

[Pariah]

IDE RAID is a bad idea in general unless you have a specific application that would benefit from such a setup. WD drives in general are not stellar RAID 0 performers, there is nothing special about the special edition drives that would remedy that. IBM drives are traditionally the best IDE RAID 0 performers, but the combination of questionable IBM drives and questionable IDE RAID is just asking for problems and then some.

 

Message LED on these forums, he had his in raid0 and wasnt that much faster. In fact he ended up selling his spare drive (to me!! ), so i would assume that it wasnt that great as you would think.....

 

[TNTrulez]

I have 2 of those in Raid 0. I don't know if they are faster or not. I ran HD tach on them but with no basis for comparision I couldn't come to any conclusion.

 

[EricCrunk]

Thanks for the input so far guys... bumpady bump for any of those who might have an experience with the drives.

 

[BeefcakeVA]

IDE RAID may make sense if you are using apps that transfer very large amounts of data (e.g. video streams) or a lot of sequential reads. But the average forum user has no need for RAID at all unless you want to mirror your main drive for redundancy. Not to mention that hard drives don't last forever and when you lose 1 out of 2 drive in your RAID 0 set you are mightily screwed.

 

[Lucky]

Not to mention that hard drives don't last forever and when you lose 1 out of 2 drive in your RAID 0 set you are mightily screwed.

Especially when you are dealing with 240 gigs of data.

 

[Mikki]

I have to agree about using raid for particular purposes. I have two WD 80g specials that I had raided, and as a test I reconfigured for a single drive. I saw no performance difference for normal computing (games, surfing, etc), and I never ran benches or tried anything that might be able to utilize the raid. I don't know about WD's not being good for raid, my setup seemed to work fine. I suppose if you were doing something that utilized it, or if you had like four drives raided, it might be worth it. But I can't recommend it based on my experiences.
One side note: one cool thing it did do for me was gave me more freedom for arranging my devices. With the raid, I was able to have my hard drives on the raid bus, my dvd and storage hard drive on my primary ide, and most importantly, my cdr on the secondary by itself (as recommended).

HTH

 

[dew042]

raid 0 increases transfer speeds, but at the sake of LATENCY..... so access times will go up, but large file transfers will be faster.... there are applications, but most folks don't need it, or would be better off without it...
dew.

 

[Muadib]

You should mirror the drives over raid 0. It's the cheapest form of backup for 120GB of data.

 

[dj4005]

I recently replaced my ailing IBM 45-gig RAID-0 array with two of the 80-gig WD special edition drives. I am tickled to death with results.

Unfortunately, I didn't benchmark before and after. On a subjective basis, it does seem to be quite a bit snappier.

For the nay-sayers out there on RAID-0, I use my setup for editing large audio files and video files. For ME, it was money well spent.

I do backups daily to a third WD, which stands at the ready should one of my existing drives crap out.

Your mileage may vary...