Raptor Drive or striped raid for performance?

[xmanflash]

Hi there,

I have a question relating to disk performance.

For my boot drive, would I be better pff getting 2 x 7200 seagate 250G drives in a raid 0 array, or one 36B raptor 10000 drive - they work out at the same price.. however I want to know which would be quicker (read and write)..

Thanks :-)

[Marc44]

1. For the Boot drive only : 36B raptor 10000 (but not necessary)
2. For video editing : 2 x 7200 seagate 250G in raid0 (faster than raptor)

Marc

[opensource]

hello
for my the raptor at 10000 rpm is the best solution, because the boot drive (c:) need fast access time .
Raid 0 (2 or 4 drive) is faster for read and write big files video/audio . but be carefull raid 0 is "fragile" if a disk fail you lost all you data in the 2 or 4 drive aray.


sorry bad English :-)

ps : "1. For the Boot drive only : 36B raptor 10000 (but not necessary)"
yes it's true but a 74gb raptor made your system very quick (start windows app. etc etc) on a 3000€/$ it's better too have one

[Marc44]

Raid0 is like a rock with serious HDD.
On the other hand, one HDD 1 Tera may crash so.
But, the Raid0 is for working only and after eiditing, I save project and co on another HDD (not raid0)

With the Raptor for the boot, yes the start is faster but in editing the is no gain.
But, you can have more chance by placing OS + drivers in RAM (in XP) :
Regedit : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management
and for the key : DisablePagingExecutive (DWORD) put value 1 (0 by default)
0 : pagination on HDD
1 : OS + drivers in RAM
You must have at least 2 Go RAM on MB.

Marc

[Jerry]

Raid0 is like a rock with serious HDD.
On the other hand, one HDD 1 Tera may crash so.
But, the Raid0 is for working only and after eiditing, I save project and co on another HDD (not raid0)

With the Raptor for the boot, yes the start is faster but in editing the is no gain.
But, you can have more chance by placing OS + drivers in RAM (in XP) :
Regedit : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management
and for the key : DisablePagingExecutive (DWORD) put value 1 (0 by default)
0 : pagination on HDD
1 : OS + drivers in RAM
You must have at least 2 Go RAM on MB.

Marc

I currently have 2 systems with raptors. One has a 36 and the other has a 150. My third system has a 400gb Seagate 7200 in it. The 36 and the 150 are over half on each. The 400gb has about 100gb on it and is much faster than the Raptors. Something to consider when looking at the drives. How much is going to be on that drive? Will it be more than half of the actual drive space? With the number of programs I have on each Raptor, it really eats up the drive space. That is the main reason I went with the 400gb drive. Keep in mind that the Raptor is a Sata1 drive running at 10,000rpm. You have to ask yourself is the price of the Raptor at 150gb going to give me the drive space/speed that I require as opposed to a 7200 400gb Sata2 drive that will have possibly only 100gbs on it.
Just a thought!

[swsw1550]

Raptor's

Hi,
I use 2 78gig Raptors on raid 0 for operating system (C:) and another 2 150 gig Raptors for storage (D: Drive) on Raid, if you want speed go this way.
Plus Raptors come with a 5yr warranty on the drives, Very Quick, Do your self a favour and by 2 and raid them you wont be sorry.

cheers
Steve

[shueardm]

If I am not mistaken, when you put a Raptor on a SATA controller all the other attached drives default to SATA 1 as well?
I have Raptor 150 Gig for OS but no other drives on that controller I use a RAID card. The Raptor is fast by itself but i only install programs to it, nothing else. The other thing to know is that Raptors start off quiet but when they get more data on them they become noisy.
And Pete, I would definately not use a 36GB Raptor.

[swsw1550]

Raptors

I use an Asus P5B Deluxe board, and plug the 2 drives into Sata 1 and 2 and the other 2 into Sata 3 and 4, Then you must load drivers once upon setup of Vista then enable them in the Bios, Its funny you say about Raptors and noise as they are a bit noisy when you are loading Windows and programs, But once everything is loaded and you do a disk clean up and defrag they settle down nice and quite, Believe me when I say if you raid 2 raptors together you will notice the speed, I would never run 1 by itself without putting it on a raid array my friend. About your Raid card I am not sure about ATA ect, I use the Intel on board Raid which is the fastest out so far..

Cheers
Steve

[shueardm]

, Believe me when I say if you raid 2 raptors together you will notice the speed,

I'd rather stick to one drive for the OS. If I want more performance I would get a Seagate 300GB SAS 15000 drive (fastest drive on earth I read) and plonk that on my SAS controller.

[antonsvideo]

I am using a Seagate 36GB 15000rpm SCSI boot drive, all programs start way faster and great speed

http://www.videoproductions.com.au/edius45/diskspeed-C.gif

for video, I use 4 x 146GB Seagate SCSI 15000rpm in Raid0

[shueardm]

Aren't they 10000rpm?

DO you use a SCSI raid card or onboard?

[Jerry]

I'd rather stick to one drive for the OS. If I want more performance I would get a Seagate 300GB SAS 15000 drive (fastest drive on earth I read) and plonk that on my SAS controller.

Yeah, 3ms seek time on that. Around $650 a drive. SAS or SATA 7 pin connector.
10 of those would be very nice.

[gdame]

Raptors where the drive to get a couple of years ago when you wanted fast SATA. If you got them, use them. But use them all on the same controller and do not mix them with newer SATA-II/300 drives.

I am not sure why a system OS drive needs to be much faster than 60-80 MB/sec. Sure seek is a spec that is nice to have fast, that is why you should use the Seagate enterprise series SATA-II drives. They have a much faster seek spec than there standard SATA-II models. Besides the enterprise series are designed for 365/24/7 operation and you will pay a slight premium for them. Their model number ends in NS. Just use one drive and make a disk image back up for the dreaded system drive failure. Almost all my systems have a matching drive fully cloned and installed in the chassis. When a customer calls me at 11 p.m. in a panic, I walk him through taking the left side panel off and moving the SATA cable and power from the failed drive to the spare drive. 2 min. later he is sitting at his fully booted desktop with all his apps that where there the day I delivered it. I perform these clone updates at various times of the year when I am onsite for some other reason.

Now, having a small raptor drive on an independant controller and using it soley as a scratch disk for the paging file does make good sense and that would boost performance a bit and make use of those fast 36's.

For media drives it is hard to beat a raid 0 or raid 0+1. Eight SATA-II/300 enterprise drives on an eight channel RocketRaid PCIe x8 will yield over 750MB/sec. using HD Tach. The CPU utilization will be +/- 2% with a 2% margin of error. How many of you could utilize that kind of performance?

[STORMDAVE]

As stated by others, I also recommend a Raptor for the OS drive only.

Then stripe Seagate 7200.11 series perpendicular drives (RAID0 or RAID0+1) 500GB or 750GB or 1TB drives, these are rock solid and very fast. Highly recommended.

No need for SCSI here. Don't always look for the RPM either...the Raptors also die faster because they spin faster....also they are a bit old school now, I would wait to see what WD has in store for the 10kRPM market.

[antonsvideo]

Aren't they 10000rpm?

DO you use a SCSI raid card or onboard?

all my drives are 15k and are connected to the onboard 320 connectors of the X5DA8 Supermicro

C drive on connector A
V drives on connector B