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Raptor or Raid?


quietglow
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I am looking to replace my system drive--I store all my media on several non-system drives.

 

BestBuy has 160G WD sata drives on sale for $80. Should I expect better performance from a $180 Raptor 74g drive or a striped pair of these sata drives on sale. The price will be about the same.

 

I havent tried doing a striped array with this particular machine, but I assume its possible.

 

Thoughts?

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I really depends on what sort of data you are transferring - i would expect the stripped pair to perform better on a large chunks of data, whereas the single raptor may be faster for small repeated access to smaller data chunks.

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I got tell you that buying Raptors for my box is the biggest mistake I made. I believe they are a complete waste of money.

 

RAID on the other hand is great, but we are still having problems getting it working here.

 

I strongly reccomend that you go with an SATA II (SATA 300 - 3 Gb/s) drive like the Hitachi TK7250 (of course you also want to make sure your motherboard supports SATA II like the Intel D945's). Here it is shown to out perform Raptors and is much cheaper:

 

http://www.cluboverclocker.com/reviews/har...i/T7K250/p3.htm

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i have a raptor adn hav used other sata discs on raid0, if u are just using the drive for everyday computing uses then u will probibly not notice much differance with a raptor or raid ( except boot times ). There aint much point lookin at 2 many benchmarks as they are mostly synthetic and its hard to work out how they relate to how you use ur pc. the dissadvantage of raid is that u gotta mess around with drivers more often.

 

if i was u i would consider spending the money on a larger sataII disk as the performance u are likely to notice from it wouldnt be too far off the raptor

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I have to tell you that raids really don't work in OSX yet. I even tried the highpoint cards with no such luck. Raptors will work on OSX86, while raids won't at the moment. But the external device raids do, like the lacie drives. So it's really a matter of preference.

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Okay you have given me good food for thought. I hunted around here a bit and thought I saw people with working software RAIDs setup--if thats gonna be touchy, I'll skip it for now. I had enough problem getting my ata working properly. And I was wondering if the raptors were really worth it anyway, but Bofors comment settles that too.

 

Actually I'm moving from ATA so just the switch to SATA ought to be something of a speed improvement.

 

Thanks for the input all.

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It's a software raid, not hardware... so you really don't get much of a boost in speed in specs. It of course depends on the software, but it might as well be JBOD. :P

 

Really? My G5's soft-RAID number's just about double in XBench.

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Just because its software raid doesn't mean that you don't get speed increases. All software raid means is that the operating system (threading especially) has to do more thread/paging management and your cpu is doing the XOR/striping/whathaveyou.

 

If you abstract a bit, chipset based hardware raid solutions are going to have overhead too, (like NFORCE3/4 for instance) because your hypertransport bus and chipset must do the RAID and manage it with all of its other integrated functions.

 

The best solution is a raid card on a pci express or pci-x bus. Either way though you're going to get performance increases on either of these three solutions over a standard non raided JBOD set of drives in most cases. If you're going to get raptor drives why not just raid those?

 

I guess it just comes down to do you want to spend more money (for more performance obviously). RAIDed raptor drives are always going to be faster than their 7200 rpm equivelents... but RAID0 is *always* going to be faster than a single drive of only minimal RPM increase. (this is not always the case with RAID/3/5/10) hope that helps put things into perspective a bit.

 

:)

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