About The Sata Drives...

[kingdingeling]

do not run 500GB drives in RAID-0! thats a bad idea, as when 1 drive c raps out you loose a TB worth of data! Use them in RAID1 or use 2 smaller HDDs in raid-0 and 2 big ones normal SATA non-raid

[jammin]

Certainly a sensible suggestion.

Basically don't run RAID 0 at all unless you are happy to sacrifice the data in the event of a drive dying or have a reasonably good backup strategy (be it on external storage media or another internal drive)

 

(For example, most of my important data gets stored on both my RAID array, my IDE drive and probably on CD/DVD as well)

Edited November 29, 2006 by jammin

[Verran]

which do you guys think would be the safest and fastest?

 

Im leaning more towards JBOD, only because it seems like it would 1 be the easiest and 2 would be less wires running around in the case.

It kind of seems like you're just setting up a RAID set for the sake of setting up a RAID set. You need to figure out what you want this thing to do first. RAID-0, RAID-1, JBOD. These things have very different uses, and if you know what you want to do, it'll be easy to decide.

 

I'll break down how I see them being used...

 

RAID-0: High read/write speeds, more risk of data loss. These high speeds don't really benefit you for MP3 storage, movies, and those sorts of things. Those activities aren't disk intensive, so you won't really see the added benefit of speed there. The two places that most home PC users will see improvement from RAID-0 speeds are games and OS. As an exercise, go ahead and total up all the disk space you use for your Windows install and all your games. What do you get? About 40gb? Go ahead and double that for future-expansion's sake. You still can't be much over 100gb, right? So what's the point of 1TB of RAID-0? It's a waste. Plus that whole TB of data is now at a higher risk of data loss.

 

RAID-1: This offers data-redundancy at the cost of write speeds. For large capacity drives, this makes a lot of sense. RAID-1 is generally used for storage data that isn't accessed as often. If you end up running 2x500gb drives in RAID-1, you may want to look at getting a smaller and faster drive for your OS and game installs, to improve access times on that stuff.

 

JBOD: I think for your application, JBOD is kind of silly. All it will do is make them into 1 virtual TB drive in Windows. That's handy, but wouldn't it be nice to break it up a bit anyways? Do you really have a single directory that will take more than 500gb?

 

Like I said, figure out what you really want these disks to do, and then we can probably help you out a lot more.

[gotdamojo06]

Thanks for the information guys, I now know alot more than I previously did about RAID. Im not sure what I will be doing quite yet, but Ill have to wait until I actually get them to decide what Im going to do.

[Verran]

Thanks for the information guys, I now know alot more than I previously did about RAID. Im not sure what I will be doing quite yet, but Ill have to wait until I actually get them to decide what Im going to do.

Look, I don't mean to tell you how to spend your money or anything, but isn't that kind of silly? Why buy drives before you know what you need them for? Wouldn't it be a LOT smarter to figure out what you need first, and then buy accordingly?

 

Do what you do, but since you've asked our advice, I feel compelled to tell you that your post doesn't really make any sense.

[gotdamojo06]

This is why Im going to upgrade...I have a 160 GB IDE drive and have only 5 GB left on it. I figure that I should go with more than 160 GB and want to try SATA becaue they are faster, so my boot times (that arnt bad) will be better. I also wanted to learn about RAID so I wanted 2 drives. So I figured I would get a large space, I dont need the TB, so for saving money, I will probably go with 2 150 or 250 GB SATA HDDs

[Verran]

This is why Im going to upgrade...I have a 160 GB IDE drive and have only 5 GB left on it. I figure that I should go with more than 160 GB and want to try SATA becaue they are faster, so my boot times (that arnt bad) will be better. I also wanted to learn about RAID so I wanted 2 drives. So I figured I would get a large space, I dont need the TB, so for saving money, I will probably go with 2 150 or 250 GB SATA HDDs

See that's my point though. If I were you, I would go for 3 disks, and you'd still probably spend less than you planned for the 2 500s. 2 500Gb was going to cost you what? At least $360.

 

So I'd start with a RAID-0 set, since that's where you'll really see performance. Pick up 2 WD 160GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0gb/s for $65 a piece. Then pick up a Seageat 250GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0gb/s for just $80. You're only spending $210 compared to $360 from before, and you've got a high speed RAID-0 array to put games and OS on, plus a huge 250GB storage area. Heck, you could get another 250 and run them in RAID-1 for safer storage and still only spend $290. Then you'd have the best of both worlds.

 

This is what I mean. Figure out what you need, then buy the disks. It's a lot smarter than just ordering something and trying to figure out how to use it later.

 

Also, SATA is not noticably faster than old IDE drives. Yes 3.0gb/s is the transfer rate of the SATA bus, but the drive can still only serve up so much data so fast. Most 7200RPM hard drives didn't use the whole ATA bandwidth anyways. They've made improvements with stuff like NCQ, but overall, SATA is not really that much faster than IDE. It's still the way to go, but I'm just saying don't expect a huge hard drive speed increase just from going to SATA.

[gotdamojo06]

thanks verran, I think that would be the best way to go