7.2k VS 10k RPM hard drives

[ClickHere2Surf.com]

I ***NEED*** new hard drives today or tommorow the latest. I have like 10 megs free in my 80 GB RAID 0 and my PC cant record my TV shows anymore because of this, not to mention my PC runs like complete crap.

I'm hesitating between these 2 options:

RAID 0 of two 7,200 RPM, 8 MB cache, 120 GB hard drives (240GB total), about $300 CAD

---OR---

RAID 0 of two 10,000 RPM, 8 MB cache, 74 GB hard drives (148 GB total), about $700 CAD

My question is, would there by a SIGNIFICANT difference gettting the 10k RPMs? I dont want to pay 5 times more per GB for a 20% difference, I would want it to be at least 3 times faster for that price.

Please reply ASAP, the stores close in 1 hour and I'd prefer getting them today rather than tommorow.

Thanks

[NooNoo]

no clue, I don't have that kind of cash.

[Radical Dreamer]

Not enough to warrant the extra money, unless your biz is video editing and 10% speed could help squeeze another job in here and there thus making you more money. Or if you have a server with lots of users using lots of files

[ClickHere2Surf.com]

After seeing benchmarks, I saw its only about a 10% speed increase, not at all worth 5 times the cost per GB. If it was at least twice the speed then I would have considered it seriously.

[techs]

I don't know of anyone who has ever compared them. I haven't seen anything like two 10k non-scsi version drives in a Raid .
My 2 cents would be that you if you are hoping for 33 percent improvement you wouldn't get that much. Especially since all the 10k drives I have seen are designed for Enterprise solutions and optimized for databases.
From what I remember when 7200 rpm drives were compared to 5400rpm drives the performance improvement was not anywhere near the 33 percent increase in rotational speed. From memory I think it might have been less than 20 percent increase and really more like 10 percent.
So my 2 cents says stick with the 7200 rpm and save the cash.

[ilovetheusers]

If you are using this to capture TV? The slower, BIGGER, cheaper hard drives are what you want.

[confus-ed]

The vfm 'winner' is what ITLU just said ! For TV capture you don't need anything wizz bang fast, just big & no need for raid either !

If you do want to compare the two speed wise in a raid situation it depends what we are comparing - ata what ? & with what controller ?

If this is as I suspect on some onboard raid card, you've got to remember they are semi software & have no buffers & cache almost always - not like you are gonna find on enterprize class servers (at like 3 times more just for the controller than we have mentioned here) which should be 15k drives anyway - the performance of the controller especially with faster drives will come more & more into the equation.

The major thing you get out of a faster spinning drive 'good' for windows is seek times (windows spends half its life looking for dlls ! - but if you have enough memory they all get loaded up eventually anyway - for writing multimedia I guess you want throughput -which on all of them should be enough as memory will buffer it) - an average 5.4k is 10-15ms, a 7.2k drive is 7-10ms while a 10k drive is gonna be 4-6ms & 15k is even less 3ms or so - that's where those 25% & 33% type 'anticipated improvement' numbers come from.

My general advice to folk is to have the fastest 'system' drive they can run to & then use 'whatever else' for storage

[Duke of Rezin]

I was looking at an impending layoff and return to school at the end of last year and decided to give myself a decent upgrade before the fact and went from running 2 Quantum AS30 Fireballs in RAID 0 to running 2 36Gb Raptors in RAID 0. The Quantums only have 2 MB of cache, slower seek times, and, of course, slower spin rates. That said, the Raptors are in every way faster and the response I get from them from the simplest tasks to heavy gaming is way faster. The only benchmarking I've done is with Sandra 2004 and that measured about a 250% increase in throughput. Ordinarily, I don't experience instances in which throughput is a factor, but the seek times and spin rates really do show their merit. If you've got the cash go for it. I think what ilovetheusers said, though, is right on. If that's your intended purpose, go for that option.

[ClickHere2Surf.com]

Sorry duke if this is too late for you, but I just realized that 4 SATA 150 drives in RAID 0 offer almost double the speed of two 10k RPM drives, and more than double the capacity, for less cost!

So instead of $700 got 152 GB in a RAID 0 of two 10k RPM drives, for the same price Ill have four 80GB (320GB) drives, 1 4 port SATA raid card, and almost double the speed of the 10k rpm raid! Not to mention a combined cache of 32 MB.

Good thing I realized this before getting the 20k rpms

[Duke of Rezin]

Man, that's the way to go. My brother gets a new computer every two years and doesn't care about the price. I'm going to offer to build one for him this time, as long as he buys the parts, of course, and was going to suggest just such a setup. Unfortunately for me, four drives was just too expensive for my own rig considering I was about to find myself without a job. By the time I get done with school, the second generation of SATA should be mature and I'll definitely be going the four drive route (with a fifth drive for backup). I'll probably get a dual proc setup as well, and those will probably be dual core. Good thing there's a nuclear power plant nearby and they'll probably have to fire up their idle stack before I'm through.

[confus-ed]

Man, that's the way to go...

..until it goes wrong ! 4 raided drives are up to 8 times more likely to encounter some error than 1 single non raided drive (striping has roughly twice the error rate with 2 drives, 4 with three & 8 with four as opposed to a single drive - & one error can kill your RAID 0 - with no redundancystone dead) - clickhere though has a tape streamer (As he & I well know ! ) so I hope he's gonna be diligent with it

The only bit you want 'extra fast' is 'system' to get windows firing 'good' (be organised & copy your streaming stuff from within your raid off onto your other disks after capture or processing -then if you are doing anything 'intense enough' to actually fill up the ide channels -you won't 'suffer') , after that considering the extra chances of it going pear shaped, I'd keep my other drives non raided, then I could be a little less keen with the backups.

[confus-ed]

no clue, I don't have that kind of cash.

No you have £s ! even if currently they are limited

$700 canadian is roughly £280 - which seems 'bang on target' to me for the specked drives.

I think 160gig drives currently work out best for vfm, but I guess it depends who you are buying 'em from ..

..So instead of $700 got 152 GB in a RAID 0 of two 10k RPM drives, for the same price Ill have four 80GB (320GB) drives, 1 4 port SATA raid card, and almost double the speed of the 10k rpm raid! Not to mention a combined cache of 32 MB...

Well still what I said about no redundancy & error rates for failing RAIDS applies - but why have you had to buy yourself a sata raid card ? - hasn't your board got one on ? if you are putting in a pci one even on a sata read board its only going at ata 133 max not 150 (SATA ready boards have that inferace wired to the memory controller/bus generally so avoiding ever going via pci) & to be honest the last thing you want running up & down your pci bus if your system is 'busy' is disk traffic - it gets full up ! (raid certainly ought to be managing that)

& btw your disk cache can't be thought of as combined - if if was on the controller then yes & the speed boost, but on each disk like this, its just a 'fat' buffer on each, so its dependent on the controller speed still.

[Shalafi]

Indeed!

Perhaps you should look at laying a good foundation first by getting a good controller, and only a couple drives (for now). Then in a few months (or whatever is right for you) get a couple more.

I can easily recommend the Promise FastTrak series of controllers. From my research and experience, theyre very fast, reliable and have some nice features for a very low price (comparatively). I use an SX4000 here, for about $100 US, with a 128meg DIMM on it.

Those controllers will therefore alleviate everything 'Ed just mentioned, and will also put you in a good position later for adding more drives. The array manager with the cards will allow this easily when you are ready.

Consider this.. If you are looking for both speed and capacity, you will get much greater speed with a good controller. The 128 or 256meg DIMM (cache) on the controller also helps tremendously with streaming data like you seem to be working with.

Regarding the drives.. Why 80 gig drives? Youll get more for your money with a higher capacity. If youre going to go with 4, at least consider RAID5 with a FastTrak controller to help prevent catastrophe that (once again) 'Ed warns about. This is something I learned first-hand myself, and it flat sucks to lose a full RAID 0 array of files you havent even gotten a chance to look at yet..

HTH

Shal

[Duke of Rezin]

As far as the controller on the PCI bus, if I were to have four drives I'd definitely want the controller on PCI Express and in this case a fifth drive for backup.
As far as the whole concept of 4 drives in such a setup goes, I would definitely be falling for the 'more is better' or bigger is better' and so on trap. Plus a lot can be said just for the fun of tinkering. I don't think I would have any mission critical material on a setup with such a high risk of failure. But since I can never leave my OS alone and break it to the point of reinstalling Windows every several months or so anyway... can't speak for ilovetheusers though.

[Duke of Rezin]

Sorry ilovetheusers, I meant ClickHere2Surf.com.