Super speed + reliability...

[Conanius]

riteo.. so im sat here know, wondering how I can have the fastest hard drive setup possible, as well as safety.. ive been talking about buying it all for a while, and this months pay cheque should sort it for me....

if I went for something like raid 0, you can add more drives for more performance yes? (so 4 drives are faster than 2?)

in doing the above, id need to backup the data still somehow.. can you get any of these external drives that do autobackups? or just touch a button and it can do it every night?

which 4 drives do I go for? the evil side of me thinks I should go mental and get 4 of those new raptors.. but would they be much quicker than 4 of these : - Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 NCQ 300GB 6V300F0 SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (HD-089-MD)

 

[smids]

Personally, 4 x Hitachi T7K250 (of your chosen size) in RAID0+1 (for 7200RPM drives) or 4xRaptor 150GB in the same config.

This is a RAID0 array backed up by a RAID1.

Excellent read due to the RAID0, but also can read from the RAID1. Writing will be at RAID0 speeds.

(I don't like or trust Maxtor enough to put them in a RAID0 array). TBH, the Hitachi's would be fine. In fact 4x 500GB hitachi's would cost almost the same as 4 x 150GB raptors but you get 1TB storage of extremely quick, redundant data - or a cheaper option WD 400GB RE2 (RAID edition 2) drives which would give you 800GB data but very solidly backed up and for a LOT less - yeah, 400GB is better tbh.

OcUK no longer stock the 400GB RE2 drive, but you can have 4 for £165 if you look around = £660 for 4 drives.

 

[Conanius]

smids, spending silly money on 4 raptor 150's in some insane raid 0 array wouldnt be much quicker then?

 

[Dunky]

4x150GB Raptors in (R)AID0 would go like brown stuff off the proverbial shovel, as long as you have a SATA setup not restricted by a PCI bus (NF4 SATA ports would be fine) however there's no redundancy (on a totally unrestricted bus, 4xRaptors would probably get you about 250/260MB+ sec read - 70MB x 4 plus overheads).

But RAID 0+1 would be the better alternative. 4x RAID0 might be faster, but depends on the stripe size and what you use the machine for. Smaller stripes are better for Windows load times, etc and larger stripe sizes are better for videos, games, etc. so the speed increase may not always be consistant. And if one drive goes.....bye bye 600GB of stuff

 

[smids]

smids, spending silly money on 4 raptor 150's in some insane raid 0 array wouldnt be much quicker then?

Oh it would be quicker - I think Arex has the screeny on page 6 of 'the New Raptor 150GB' thread - however, you don't have reliability in this case. 4 drives in a RAID0, even Raptors, is not very safe. One fails, you lose the lot. My preference would be 4 400GB RE2 drives as I suggested giving you a very fast, but also quite safe array (unless one drive from each mirror fails at the same time). You'll have the benefit of RAID0 reads coupled with RAID1 reads probably giving overall read of about 160Mb/s average, but also the redundancy of RAID1.

800GB of RAID0+1 - fast and reliable.

Or

600GB RAID0 Very fast, very unreliable.

That's my personal perspective anyway. It works out about £200 cheaper going for large capacity drives too, with 200GB extra space.

 

[Jimbo Mahoney]

Oh, and just FYI, Raid 1+0 would be better (more redundancy) than RAID 0+1.