HDD and RAID?

Question

[High Tech Level required to understand question]

I'm thinking about building a desktop and need help choosing a HDD. I look for speed/performance/cost as disk space is not too important to me. I am between the Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10,000RPM HDD or two (2) smaller 7,200RPM HDD's with RAID 0. Which would be faster?

SATA HDD and the two 7,200 rpm HDDs set up on a RAID 0

I know what the different RAIDs are and that data striping has the chance to lose all data. I don't care about that, as it was not mentioned in the question. The question is, which is more performance and speed.

Answer 1

Two 7,200 rpm RAID 0 discs should be about the same speed as a single 10,000rpm drive. Maybe a little faster even. ~

Answer 2

RAID 0 is generally not used in commercial environments as it provides striping without recovery capabilities if a stripe/portion of the file goes bad. They generally use either RAID 1 (mirroring) or RAID 5 (striping with parity protection).

Do a search on RAID to learn more about RAID. One vendor, LSI logic, www.lis.com does describe the various RAID levels.

Unless you manipulating very large files, i.e. approx. 10 MB or more, then you'll likely see minimal differences in performance between RAID 0 and a non-RAID environment. Further, once you create a RAID 0 set, you cannot undo it unless you backup all the data and then, rebuild the data set. (Since you may likely have the system on these disks, then that means a lot of work!)

RAID is interesting but I'd really encourage that you keep it simple, just use the two disks independently, called JBOD, just a bunch of disks!

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Answer 3

The key to this question is what program are you accessing the drives with.
The WD 150 will be as fast as the two drives at RAID 0 if you are only copying files through windows or linux OS. Windows file copies max out at about 40 to 50mb/s.
If you are using special programs that will directly access the drives doing block transfers then the two drives at RAID 0 will be faster.
Using RAID 0. Please keep in mind if one drive in a RAID 0 array fails all data is lost. Direct Access programs are typically video editing applications, DVR and some backup programs.

Answer 4

To get the performance of raid and the same size you will need 2 disks of 150GB, as the performance comes from mirroring, you only get the size of 1 drive.

Answer 5

the 10,000 rpm will be faster, but if you need to cut money off of the total price go with the two smaller ones, but make them SATA