To RAID (0) or Not

[twolves06]

Hey guys,
I'm just finishing uo a htpc build and am tyring to decide on the harddrive. I know performance isn't a huge issue with a build like this but I was wondering how much of an increase RAID 0 would provide. Redundancy is not an issue what so ever. I figure I could get two solid 120gb drives for $35 or so more than a $250gb drive. What do you guys think the performance increase would look like? I was hoping for about 150% in order to make this worthwhile.

opteron 146 @ 2.45 GHz
Corsair 2x512 XMS
Epox 9npa+ Ultra

 

[Bobthelost]

For gaming? Not.

It's no faster than a single drive and going for a larger, more modern drive means that you'll get a faster system overall.

For general office apps and photoshopping then RAID does make a little difference.

 

[us3rnotfound]

Originally posted by: Bobthelost
For gaming? Not.

It's no faster than a single drive and going for a larger, more modern drive means that you'll get a faster system overall.

For general office apps and photoshopping then RAID does make a little difference.

well for loading huge 3d worlds for titles such as BF2 etc, you should see a world of difference using RAID 0 configuration.

 

[Bobthelost]

Originally posted by: us3rnotfound

Originally posted by: Bobthelost
For gaming? Not.

It's no faster than a single drive and going for a larger, more modern drive means that you'll get a faster system overall.

For general office apps and photoshopping then RAID does make a little difference.

well for loading huge 3d worlds for titles such as BF2 etc, you should see a world of difference using RAID 0 configuration.

Point, but a 120Gb drive is likely to be a generation or so out of date, so by swtiching to a Hitachi 7k250 he'd definitly see better performance for all the aplications that RAID wouldn't help with.

 

[alpha88]

My $0.02:

There are two aspects to hard drive speed: Latency and Bandwidth.

Raid 0 (and Raid 5, which I prefer over Raid 0), sacrifice some latency in order to increase bandwidth. This is great in many applications, where large files will be processed - primarily video. On the other hand, the increase in latency hurts performance when many different (small) files will be accessed, such as in gaming.

I use a raptor to hold my games (low latency), and a raid 5 array of bigger hard drives for my videos and other content (high bandwidth)

Since you're planning to work with video, the increase in latency shouldn't hurt you too much. However, don't expect too much of an improvement with raid 0 - it depends on a lot of factors.

 

[us3rnotfound]

Originally posted by: Bobthelost

Originally posted by: us3rnotfound

Originally posted by: Bobthelost
For gaming? Not.

It's no faster than a single drive and going for a larger, more modern drive means that you'll get a faster system overall.

For general office apps and photoshopping then RAID does make a little difference.

well for loading huge 3d worlds for titles such as BF2 etc, you should see a world of difference using RAID 0 configuration.

Point, but a 120Gb drive is likely to be a generation or so out of date, so by swtiching to a Hitachi 7k250 he'd definitly see better performance for all the aplications that RAID wouldn't help with.

Oh, I agree, no use it raiding 2 outdated drives. I guess I should have read.

 

[Bobthelost]

You're not the only one who didn't read the OP propperly , it's for a HTPC? There is more case for RAID then as it would start to see the benifit from it. I'd still say it'd be better to buy the single 250gb, but that's mostly out of sheer bloody mindedness.

 

[twolves06]

Thanks for the replies guys. I'm not much of a gamer but I thought I might pick it up a bit. It's hard to resist when you have a nice HD lcd that works well for a monitor. So it looks like I might jump on one of the SATA deals this week. NCQ seems necessary but what about cache size. I'm assuming a nice quiet Barracuda with NCQ is the best bet here.

 

[twolves06]

Almost forgot... What are your opinions on hard drive performance while streaming videos from a file server?

 

[Bobthelost]

If you want to see concrete numbers for HD performance then look at storage review, they have a database of all the drives they've tested and scores for how well they perform for each and every task.

Two of the best SATA drives are the Hitachi 7k250 and the WD2500KS, the hitachi is the better of the two for the most part. NCQ is a bad idea for non server use. It slows down single user performance.

Seagate isn't as quiet as they used to be, the noiseless option is to go for samsung spinpoints for that.

 

[twolves06]

Just ordered a WD2500KS from ZZF. Thanks for the help guys.