PC Peripherals HDD query

V

Vandal

Skilled
Guys choice time

using RAID 0+1 Hitachi drives intended

SATA 2.0 drives

should I go with

250gb*2

or

160gb*4

using P180 so no housing probs for the HDD's and also price not a factor, want speed on SATA only
 
Anish said:
For Raid 0+1 you need 4 drives, so obviously it has to be 160*4...
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Oops sorry if I forgot to mention I will be using RAID 0 initially, after some time may go for a 0+1
Is their any redundant form of RAID (0 being strictly for performance not data security) which can run on 2 or 3 drives??
I was talking about performance figures...4 drives will be faster right?
what about non even numbers say 3 or 5 drives??
 
raid-0 is only performance. raid-1 is only redundancy. 0+1 combines both. That's all that is supported by onboard chipsets.

raid-0 can work on any number of drives. 2,3,4,5 etc. nvraid can span array across sata and pata as well.

Ofcourse, with raid-0, as you increase no. of drives, risk of failure increases.
 
zhopudey said:
raid-0 is only performance. raid-1 is only redundancy. 0+1 combines both. That's all that is supported by onboard chipsets.

raid-0 can work on any number of drives. 2,3,4,5 etc. nvraid can span array across sata and pata as well.

Ofcourse, with raid-0, as you increase no. of drives, risk of failure increases.
Click to expand...
tech talk zhop.... I already knew that...
gimme a better option
250* 2 (later maybe 250* 4) raid 0 later raid 0+1
160*4 raid 0+1
I need around 300 gigs of space....requirement won't increase as I have 2 dvdrw's and an 80 gig drive also 7200 rpm....
 
Well, the new hitachi 250 sata2 have got good reviews. They'll be really fast in raid-0. But then 4 drives will be faster than 2.
So, 250*4 > 160*4 > 250*2.

The fastest of course will be WD Raptors:- 74*4. In the CHIP review, they managed to install winXP in under 6 mins with these.

Edit: If you need only 300gb, the hitachi 80gb sata2 would be a better choice. 80*4 would be great.
 
zhopudey said:
Well, the new hitachi 250 sata2 have got good reviews. They'll be really fast in raid-0. But then 4 drives will be faster than 2.
So, 250*4 > 160*4 > 250*2.

The fastest of course will be WD Raptors:- 74*4. In the CHIP review, they managed to install winXP in under 6 mins with these.

Edit: If you need only 300gb, the hitachi 80gb sata2 would be a better choice. 80*4 would be great.
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Nice answer...And the only reason why I'm not going for 80 gigs is I may need raid 0+1 in which case storage will come down to around 160gigs...
 
@Vandal

if have some spare time read this article from this page onwards - very good info on raid...

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/index.htm

I will also quote this page from Anandtech which I had inserted in another thread very recently in this forum....

Final Words
If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

There are some exceptions, especially if you are running a particular application that itself benefits considerably from a striped array, and obviously, our comments do not apply to server-class IO of any sort. But for the vast majority of desktop users and gamers alike, save your money and stay away from RAID-0.

If you do insist on getting two drives, you are much better off putting them into a RAID-1 array to have a live backup of your data. The performance hit of RAID-1 is just as negligible as the performance gains of RAID-0, but the improvement in reliability is worthwhile...unless you're extremely unlucky and both of your drives die at the exact same time.

When Intel introduced ICH5, and now with ICH6, they effectively brought RAID to the mainstream, pushing many users finally to bite the bullet and buy two hard drives for "added performance". While we applaud Intel for bringing the technology to the mainstream, we'd caution users out there to think twice before buying two expensive Raptors or any other drive for performance reasons. Your system will most likely run just as fast with only one drive, but if you have the spare cash, a bit more reliability and peace of mind may be worth setting up a RAID-1 array.

Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth.
Click to expand...

Full article at Anandtech here.... http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101
 
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Nice link.... the anandtech 1 I had read earlier and wanted to xperiment for myself to see whether any performance gains would be realised...
will try with 160*2 n post here...
 
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