Hard drive performance

[barry685]

Which will likely perform better? 2 Samsung spinpoint F3 drives in a Raid 0 configuration, or a Wd Velociraptor 450gb 1000k rpm drive?

[nemophoto]

From my limited experience, I believe your best bet is still a 10K single drive. I use to use a RAID 0, however, problems I encountered, which I believe had to do with a bad sector (which entailed me having to go all the way back to DOS to work around crashes to get back to a single drive) has made me gun-shy of RAIDS. I found when I benchmarked my RAID, while some of the the throughput was indeed fast, the jumping back and forth between drives actually caused fairly significant "valleys" in the performance.

My 2-cents.

Nemo

[John.Murray]

Assuming you have a SATA 6GBs controller, definately the WD

[DeanChriss]

You might want to check thePuget Systems article at
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/SATA-Controller-Performance-Explored-87

They found that "no traditional platter SATA hard drives can actually run fast enough to benefit from a 6Gbps interface", including the 10K RPM Velociraptor. The conclusion is that unless you're using SSD, it doesn't matter whether you plug your SATA III drive into a SATA III or SATA II interface.

[John.Murray]

Interesting Article!  Thanks.  I noticed they used Crystal Disk Mark for the tests, I'm not familiar with it, preferring instead the tried and true Iometer.  That said, I'll definately check it out, as Iometer is not fun to use....  One thing that jumps out at me is no indication of the size of the data-sets used for testing.  My experience has been a noticeable increase in throughput, particularly when multiple drives are being used.