[70597]

My PC's pretty much maxed out, but my hard drive performance kinda sucks, and was wanting to invest in the future in either 2 cheap drives for RAID, or maybe a Raptor. What do you guys think?

 

[LoneWolf]

if you need space then i would suggest RAID if you want a hard drive for stuff like games then go for raptor

 

[Princess Garnet]

From what I've read, despite the theoretical advantages of RAID (twice the throughput, twice the speed, etc.), theories fail yet again and reality kicks in, and the gain is just about nothing! You save two or three seconds off of half a minute of loading, or sure, if you're FRAPSing alot, two dedicated drives in RAID might be better, but it never was intended for desktops, and the gains are so small that it has no place in one. I was going to RAID with my new drives if it was worth it, but it's not.

I'd therefore say a drive with a higher RPM, like a Raptor, would be better. Personally, I don't think its worth roughly a little under three times the cost (this vs. this) for not even one and a half times the gain (it's mostly placebo effect versus real results), either, so I'd say none myself, but of the two, the Raptor is the only one that makes sense.

Edit: Going RAID for space is a bad idea, since you can usually (not always, but in most cases) get one larger drive cheaper than two smaller ones that equal it's space.

 

[70597]

I wouldn't be going for space with RAID. I've got 1.5TB[approx.] space, which is more than I'll ever need.

 

[Princess Garnet]

The part about space was towards DevinWolf.

I edited the other part too though. Personally, I don't see the point in either. Disk benchmarks are only disk benchmarks. If the drive is defragmented enough and not over three quarters full, it's generally fast enough. If you're willing to drop the price on the bad price to performance ratio though (some "normal" SATA drives come close to Raptors in some areas on alot of tests), the Raptor is pretty fast. You won't get faster without going into SCSI or SSD territory.

 

[70597]

Do you have any recommendations and/or benchmarks on normal drives that perform nearly as well? If I can find a normal drive that does nearly the same job for way cheaper, that'd be fine with me.

 

[skoreanime]

If money wasn't an issue... <3 Velociraptor. I'd definitely replace my older Raptor with one if I wasn't hording my money right now

 

[70597]

Seems like Raptor's the way to go then. I don't mind hearing other opinions, though.

 

[skoreanime]

Well, RAID isn't bad. It's actually quite nice speed wise if you go RAID0 and stripe for it accordingly.

I stopped using RAID0 when my RAID crashed and I lost all my data...

 

[lagunareturns]

raid will crash when it is poorly implemented on the motherboard, i'd prefer a h/w raid with a real dedicated card, not only you get real speed (they will have much greater throughput since they arent a chip on a motherboard with up to 500 Mb/s (500 is achieved on expensive and mobos dedicated for server) pathway on it and they still rely on software to work), stability but when you switch motherboards, the drives in the raid wont need to formatted.... sure it maycost around 200-300 aus dollars but it the long run it is worth it

 

[skoreanime]

^

That is true. When most people talk about RAID, they probably mean onboard RAID controllers. Dedicated RAID controllers are much more efficient and reliable, but like laguna said, comes at a cost.

Still, I stand by my choice of Velociraptors. Though it's pretty expensive too. 300GB Velociraptor for $300-400.

 

[lagunareturns]

but 300-400 you can buy two 500gig hdds plus a raid controller and achieve greater speed plus two normal drives generate less heat and is more efficient with power than a single Velociraptors

 

[Phil]

Here, a 300 gb raptor is 199.99 on sale. Only Rap charges less i think