Whats faster?

[Maddscientist]

Trying to figure out what would be faster to place my OS and game files on and being the extreamly lazy person I can sometimes be. Decided I would ask sombody who already compared the two?

Whats fast 2x80Gig WDSE8mb Raid 0 or, 1X 120Sata II Seagate?

Im leaning towards the 120 but never underestimate the power of raid to the second power.

BTW My system specs are

AMD64 3000+ @ Stock for now
DFILanPartty UT 250gb NForceIII
1 Gig Geil DDR3200
1x80 WDSE 8m
X800 XT PE

Geting via newegg 1 more 80gigwd se and one 120Sata II drive built by Seagate.

 

[Maddscientist]

Darn still no answer....bump for somebody out there that knows.

 

[amol]

120G from Seagate would be a better solution

RAID0 offers VERY litte and unnoticeable changes

 

[CheesePoofs]

Raid0 gives next no no performance improvement, but i don't know about SATAII.

Btw ... where'd you mannage to find a sataII drive?

 

[DarkKnight]

Originally posted by: CheesePoofs
Raid0 gives next no no performance improvement, but i don't know about SATAII.

Btw ... where'd you mannage to find a sataII drive?

newegg link

 

[Maddscientist]

Posted the link seconds after darkknight...thats the one. I was under the impression that stripping increased performance drasticly? Guess I had my wires crossed.....Thanks

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Maddscientist
Posted the link seconds after darkknight...thats the one. I was under the impression that stripping increased performance drasticly? Guess I had my wires crossed.....Thanks

It roughly doubles sustained transfer rate (STR), and allows some amount of concurrency (that is, you can theoretically run two small reads or writes in parallel if they hit different stripes). However, neither of these benefits are very helpful for a typical desktop computer, where the limiting factor is usually seek time, and you are rarely running multiple disk-intensive programs at once.

 

[ribbon13]

Striping is not meant for gaming. In apps that use lots and lots of I/Os, its far better than a single drive. But people that actually need it already know it.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

agreed, unless you do a good bit of video encoding/editing or 3d rendering (maya, cad, etc.), a single drive with faster seek rates would fare better on a desktop.

 

[SunSamurai]

RAID0 with the right controller will give you added snappyness in everyday OS transverceing. Though a good setup consists of two+ drives raid or otherwise anyway instead of one large one. If you do go the two drive way, make sure the pagefile is on the drive not holding the OS.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: aeternitas
RAID0 with the right controller will give you added snappyness in everyday OS transverceing. Though a good setup consists of two+ drives raid or otherwise anyway instead of one large one. If you do go the two drive way, make sure the pagefile is on the drive not holding the OS.

Once again the truth is exactly the opposite of what aeternitas said. Was the 2nd sentence even English?

RAID0 will give you added transfer rate at the expense of a little snappyness in everything else, which is only going to speed up massively bandwidth-hungry things like high-res Photoshop work and video editing. Usually it is best to put the OS and pagefile on the same drive and all your applications and data on a different drive unless your machine is choked for memory, then you want the swapfile to have as much bandwidth as possible.

If you're looking for performance you should be looking at getting faster drives (like a Raptor 74) not extra drives to RAID with your old 80GB WD. It is especially iffy combining a new WD800JB and an old one because if it's over a year old it might not even have the same platter configuration.

Unless you're doing something like video editing,you will generally get more performance by using the drives separately and splitting up things like your OS/apps/data so they can be accessed in parallel.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Few motherboards offer four on-board SATA plugs and RAID controller -- more mobos are available for two drives with RAID.

That being said, sometime last year an article appeared in the industry mags about "optimal" RAID configuration. The results lent themselves to a conclusion that a three-drive RAID-0 array was fastest, with no perceptible increase from adding a fourth drive -- ostensibly because the I/O bottleneck had been reached at that point.

I don't think you LOSE any performance potential with RAID-0, but the performance gains are negligible for everything other than video-encoding. Further, without RAID-0 + 1, your sh*t-outta-luck if a drive goes bad and you forgot to make a backup of at least your data. And downloaded install files for on-line software purchases. And e-mail files. You know what I mean. Hasn't happened to me yet, however.

I don't think RAID 0 arrays are recoverable, and there is added risk.

 

[amol]

RAID0 is meant for server type things

 

[Amaroque]

Originally posted by: Tostada
Unless you're doing something like video editing,you will generally get more performance by using the drives separately and splitting up things like your OS/apps/data so they can be accessed in parallel.

Originally posted by: Matthias99
It roughly doubles sustained transfer rate (STR), and allows some amount of concurrency (that is, you can theoretically run two small reads or writes in parallel if they hit different stripes). However, neither of these benefits are very helpful for a typical desktop computer, where the limiting factor is usually seek time, and you are rarely running multiple disk-intensive programs at once.

I think this about sums it up best.

 

[Maddscientist]

Thanks for the input....im lucky enough on this motherboard to have 4xSata + Raid 4xPata + Raid......nice options but I think im just ganna sit tight with all Sata drives now.

 

[bob4432]

is that not just a regular sata drive? what would make it sataII?