hello everyone i am looking to upgrade my hard drives. iam looking for the fastest hard drive out for SATA or IDE on Raid config. But i have been looking around and not sure what hard drive to have. Thinking to have 2x 74GB Western Digital Raptor 10K but dont know if they will make any difference in a Raid setup? also would like to know which Raid setup would be the best RAID 0 or RAID 1 thanks.
RAID 0/Striping: This takes 2x (size of the smallest hard drive0) and makes it one big drive, in your case, 148GB. The advantage is speed since both drives are written to or read simutaneously. The massive drawback is that if one drive goes, the entire array is shot as far as your data is concerned. The reason behind this is because since the drives are seen as one massive drive to the OS, half the data is on one drive and half the data is on the other. Since the RAID controllers on most motherboards outside of server-class ones don't tend to have a processor for the controller or dedicated RAM, the regular CPU must process this, and it may not feel any faster. RAID 1/mirroring. Basically, this copies the smallest drive size to the other in the array. If one drive goes, you've got a full backup. The cost is a hit on speed, which you may notice a little more than you would with RAID 0. Additionally, in your case, you'd only have 74GB of storage. Again, as with RAID 0, you'd have some performance hit due to the system having to process things. This wouldn't be present if you happen to use a high-end RAID card with it's own processor and on-board RAM. The downside there is that those cards tend to run at least a few hundred dollars. I've tried RAID 0, and for all the talk about it, I couldn't tell a difference. Quite honestly, I don't think it's a very good RAID simply because there's no redundancy at all. If you understand the risks involved, and keep a solid backup regiment, then you'll be fine. RAID 1 does back things up, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't back them up yourself. Hard drives are mechanical and will at some point in time fail, so do not rely on any form of RAID entirely. For me, RAID was simply a waste, but if you're curious to try it out, go for it. Outside of SCSI drives, the Raptors are the fastest drives out there.
There's a lot more than just RAID 0 and 1 though as you know. I'd be curious to see how other setups perform as the two mentioned sound next to pointless unless you want to blow a bunch more on a controller. For example the ASUS SLI Deluxe has all these options under storage devices. PATA RAID NV RAID 0/1/0+1 JBOD SATA RAID NV RAID 0/1/0+1 JBOD Additional SATA RAID RAID 0/1/0+1/5 Additional RAID Controller Sil 3114
5 drives I guess, I don't really know anything about that though. I doubt windows would even recognize over 1T.
yeah, i read in a magasine about the new hard drives and they way they'll be made to work, they said that there's only so small you can make things, at a certain point the charged parts will start to induce charges on the parts directly next to it with the current setup, this means data could be changed and lost. With the new drives this could be stopped by lining things up differently and we could soon see a 1TB HDD if someone makes it work. But i doubt people will move to it, they'll probably cost a bomb and wont be supported by windows...then there'll be a patch to fix it, which wont work or something...
sori about the delay of this reply been studying the last couple of weeks for my exams. thanks all for all the infomatiom been given but one more thing iam after that would that i heard that 2 normal hard drives (7200rpm) in a raid would performe the same as a WD raptor hard(15000rpm), but if i had 2 of the WD raptor hard drives in raid would there be any speed difference? then just having the one WD raptor hard drive in a non raid.
A RAID 0 setup would be faster than a single drive providing it is setup correctly and the hardware is up to it. How much faster isn't for certain as it can vary.
Yeah awhile ago I looked up raid settings and as AT linked it's only a 4 drive setup. And big ones like raid 50 (5+0) do not need 50 drives, just 5 if I remember.
http://www.hardwareforums.com/raid-arrays-8216/ I made that thread to help on RAID setups, its got a link to Wikipedia where i read up on RAID, still got to remember it though hah:
