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LAN Party Forums => Support Group => Started by: sparticusx on January 15, 2006, 06:29:13 PM
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I was looking to get 4 SATA II Harddrives from Seagate (160 GB) and running a Raid 0 Set. I would think this is currently the highest performace available for the price/size (raptors are STUPID, sorry) considering to spend the same amount of money on raptors, i'd be getting 2 - 74GB drives, thats 1/4 the size im looking at....
ANYWAY, the question is, what kind of bandwidth am i looking at, is it really going to be the full 1200Gigabites/Second(150Gigabytes/Sec)?
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Negative
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Take a serious look at the seagate NCQ drives, I just got an 80gig one in the main game server for the lan and I love it, seems faster than comparable maxtor/wd drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148105
The raptors are not the godly drives everyone makes them out to be, if you want speed, and are willing to spend the money, go with SCSI drives. Until then go with good 7200rpm drives, there is less chance of failure (devide mtbf by number of drives in array), and more capacity per dollar, with not much loss of speed
edit:also note, that in raid you aren't gonna get the 1500gbs bandwith you were talking about, as each sata drive doesn't saturate its pipe, and you have the limit of the PCI bus (which if you're still using 32bit non express will be really low) to worry about.
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Negative
What in the world are you talking about?...it was NOT a YES/NO Answer..
And i currently have 2 Seagate SATA 150 drives, a 300GB and a 250GB, both very fast, I just wanted an opinion, also, i did notice that 7200RPM drives max out at 60 MegaBYTEs a second, so i would be looking at 240MBps, which is....(240/.125) approximately 2 Gbits/second. thats a CONSTANT rate, not BURST. burst is much higher but i don't know what it would be off the top of my head.
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Take a serious look at the seagate NCQ drives, I just got an 80gig one in the main game server for the lan and I love it, seems faster than comparable maxtor/wd drives.
[url]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148105[/url]
The raptors are not the godly drives everyone makes them out to be, if you want speed, and are willing to spend the money, go with SCSI drives. Until then go with good 7200rpm drives, there is less chance of failure (devide mtbf by number of drives in array), and more capacity per dollar, with not much loss of speed
edit:also note, that in raid you aren't gonna get the 1500gbs bandwith you were talking about, as each sata drive doesn't saturate its pipe, and you have the limit of the PCI bus (which if you're still using 32bit non express will be really low) to worry about.
I'll be using SATA II Nforce4 Ultra Chipset Raid. Im pretty sure...its blazing fast.
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I'll be using SATA II Nforce4 Ultra Chipset Raid. Im pretty sure...its blazing fast.
That's what I'm running too..........no complaints here.......
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I'll be using SATA II Nforce4 Ultra Chipset Raid. Im pretty sure...its blazing fast.
That's what I'm running too..........no complaints here.......
Are your drives in raid 0? I see you have 2 120s, if they are sata 3Gb, please post your benchmarks. Like Winmark 99 2.0 TRANSFER Benchmark, looking for the most Transfer speeds...make my windows load in 10seconds and BF2 maps in same or less. THAT would be amazing
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I didn't RAID them this time, when I did, they flew!
SATA II is 150 with NCQ
SATA 2 is 300
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If you actually do build a four drive raid 0 array, you deserve every bit of performance that you will NOT be getting from it, and the inevitable disk crash/data corruption that will ensue.
And for the record, your seek times are still limited to the speed of the drives. Don't think for a second that the 4-disk array will get even close to the seek times of a single Raptor (76GB or greater that is.) The only time you would even have a chance at getting any real use out of such an array would be if you actually spent the money on a real controller. Hint: The stuff that comes on motherboards does not qualify as a 'real' RAID controller. They have no buffering, they have very poor logic, and the only time they really serve any use is for basic RAID 1 setups. Anything more, and you need to say hello to forking out money for something decent.
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And since I'm too lazy to bother registering, and editing of posts isn't available unless I do register, here's a bit of a P.S.
Take about ten second of your time and visit a couple of sites. Namely Anandtech.com and storagereview.com. Both sites have very nice articles on how worthless RAID 0 really is. People who claim to notice 'm4d haxx0rz speed increesez!@#211' from RAID 0 are basically full of Crap. The only place that you will ever see a speed increase is in nice, worthless, synthetic benchmarks.
And more on topic even, your poll suggest to me that you aren't already running at least a gig of ram. If you aren't, then you need to be. That will give you more of a noticeable performance boost than any drive array cocktail you are likely to utilize.
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Thoreau welcome to FITES! Thanks for your advice and analysis!
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And since I'm too lazy to bother registering, and editing of posts isn't available unless I do register, here's a bit of a P.S.
Take about ten second of your time and visit a couple of sites. Namely Anandtech.com and storagereview.com. Both sites have very nice articles on how worthless RAID 0 really is. People who claim to notice 'm4d haxx0rz speed increesez!@#211' from RAID 0 are basically full of Crap. The only place that you will ever see a speed increase is in nice, worthless, synthetic benchmarks.
And more on topic even, your poll suggest to me that you aren't already running at least a gig of ram. If you aren't, then you need to be. That will give you more of a noticeable performance boost than any drive array cocktail you are likely to utilize.
I've been researching AnandTech.com and Storagereview.com, both of them show faster transfer rates, but seek times are usually the same, but this is the differance, WD Raptor - Fail, Seagate = Win, Im not looking for 1ms seek times, I am looking for fast transfer rates, faster installs, faster load times, and larger drive space, I was looking at a 500GB Seagate Sata II drive with 16Mb of cache before I decided i wanted MORE SPACE for LESS CASH, i don't care if raptors are faster, I want more HD space. I can get 4 Seagate 160GB harddrives in raid 0 to run faster and have more space than the 1 500. Not to mention paying about the same for 640GB of space. Im not saying Raid 0 is the only option im looking at, I plan on getting these drives before the LAN, and doing 2 benchmarks, 1 with Raid 0, 1 With Raid 5. Since raid 5 with 3-5 drives is best, and with 4 drives i only lose 1/4th total capacity. In that situation I'd have 480GB, which sounds good too. Not that loosing 1 drive to hd crash is a huge concern, I have a 300 and 250 currently, and i use those to store My Docs, My Programs, Program Files, Save Games exc, Either using ghost or just mounting those drives to those folders in C:
and FYI, yes i have 2GB ram...if you have BF2 and you don't...you must not like to play.
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SCSI drives are worse than Raptors. I never said I had all the money in the world. Damn im still in high-school.
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I've been researching AnandTech.com and Storagereview.com, both of them show faster transfer rates, but seek times are usually the same, but this is the differance, WD Raptor - Fail, Seagate = Win, Im not looking for 1ms seek times, I am looking for fast transfer rates, faster installs, faster load times, and larger drive space, I was looking at a 500GB Seagate Sata II drive with 16Mb of cache before I decided i wanted MORE SPACE for LESS CASH, i don't care if raptors are faster, I want more HD space. I can get 4 Seagate 160GB harddrives in raid 0 to run faster and have more space than the 1 500. Not to mention paying about the same for 640GB of space. Im not saying Raid 0 is the only option im looking at, I plan on getting these drives before the LAN, and doing 2 benchmarks, 1 with Raid 0, 1 With Raid 5. Since raid 5 with 3-5 drives is best, and with 4 drives i only lose 1/4th total capacity. In that situation I'd have 480GB, which sounds good too. Not that loosing 1 drive to hd crash is a huge concern, I have a 300 and 250 currently, and i use those to store My Docs, My Programs, Program Files, Save Games exc, Either using ghost or just mounting those drives to those folders in C:
and FYI, yes i have 2GB ram...if you have BF2 and you don't...you must not like to play.
They show faster speeds in benchmarks. Not in real life.
"I plan on getting these drives before the LAN, and doing 2 benchmarks"
If you have to run benchmarks to tell the difference, then you have already proven my point. Both AT and SR's articles make it perfectly clear that the performance gained by RAID 0 can only be seen in benchmarks, and unless you are going to re-write the Crapty code in BF2, those map loads aren't gonna get any faster. Say 'thank you EA games!'
Let's see, 640 gigs of space... yup, that's nice to have. Too bad your non-raided drives don't equal up to that to, because when a drive goes, you'll be losing all 640 gigs of data.
It doesn't matter how fast your RAID 0 goes, it will still take a few years to copy 640 gigs worth of data back, and much of that I'm sure will have to go through application installation processes. Say bye bye to actually having the time to play those games.
Good to hear that RAm isn't in short supply at least.
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Well 1 option I didn't fully explore was raid 1+0 Mirrored then Striped, Where my read - 4X which is good for Loadtimes, and Write is 2X which is nice for installs. arguing that my dvd-rom isn't fast enough to increase my install speed...im using images 9/10. yes and for BF2. I would say I'd be looking at Raid 0+1 but who wants backups of 1/2 files...nonetheless, I think i'll do raid 0, just to be ignorant.
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Oh, and just for fun, for about the same price of 4 - 160gb Raid 0 Seagate Sata II drives, I could get a WD 150GB Raptor...
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/01/03/wd_raptor_150gb/
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And for the price of five Infinit G35s, you could get an Aston martin DB9.
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And for the price of five Infinit G35s, you could get an Aston martin DB9.
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LOL, and the value of 5 Dodge Neons could buy you a Turkey Sandwich. but thats a differant story
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didn't maximum pc have a cover storyt about this exact topic this month? I know they wrote a 2 page article about raid 0 drives, but I'm not sure if it was this months or last months magizine. Will have to look back and see what I find...will post the results
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OK, I have about 400 Bucks for harddrives, I want atleast 400 GB of storage for that price. What are my options.
I was thinking,
All SATA II, 7200RPMs
Raid 0 250GB x 2
Raid 0 160GB x4
NoRaid 500GB x 1
Raid 0 200GB x 3
Other Thoughts, Note, Performance is what Im looking for as a BYPRODUCT, SPACE is the bigger issue. Game installs + images + patches and exc, getting to the point where they are about 1-10GB is size. And im not worried about if a drive fails, I have 1 Free HD recover from drivesavers.com so thats NOT and ISSUE...Fudge redundancy...
If I was running 1 500GB or 4 160GB both cases 1 dies, all data is lost.