Hard drives question

Khannie

I'm in the market for 2 SATA hard drives as I want some RAID 0 lovin'.

I was just checking on jes, and there are four drives there (I'm looking for 2x80GB). All are 8MB Cache.

Maxtor - Unknown seek time - €57.32
Samsung - 8.9ms - €55.33
Seagate - 8.5ms - €60.60
Hitachi - 8.8ms - €55.22 (This one says SATA 2. Is this > SATA 150 or just marketing jargon / pants?)

I remember reading before that some drives are quieter than others. I like quiet drives. Can't remember which are quiet though. I'm also looking for reliability since I'm going to be Raid 0'ing (increased risk of catastrophic data loss).

All advice most welcome.

vishal

why don't you buy some more ram instead. you will get a better performance increase with some more ram than with raid 0

irlrobins

maxtor has gotten good feedback here...

http://stores.tomshardware.com/rating_getprodrev.php/product_id=820303/id_type=M//

Inspector Gadget

I'm afraid that you'll probably get as many posts on this as there are possible options, but my tuppence ha'penny goes like this:

(Before I go on, it's important to note that you can get a dud drive from any manufacturer, so take anything else I (or anyone else) say(s) to include this disclaimer)

My personal opinion is as follows.

• Maxtor: Cheap, can be very fast, wouldn't trust them as fas as I can throw 'em. Have had a _lot_ of bad luck with them in the past. Unfortunately, due to various events, I own four of 'em I find them to run hot and to make a lot of noise, generally - the servos make quite a racket when seeking, even on the newest Plus 9/Plus 10 models (Have a 160GB SATA Plus 10, a 160GB PATA Plus 9, and a 120GB PATA Plus 9, all recent drives - they're all hot and noisy)
• Seagate: Generally wonderful reliability (A 5 year warranty says a lot!), quiet (particularly the PATA drives, it seems), performance is a bit lacking in the 7200.7 series (that would be the only option for the size range you're aiming for, IIRC). Speed problems fixed in the 7200.8, I'm told.
• Samsung: Respectable performance, impressively quiet, cool-running (due to a maximal platter count of two in any Samsung drive), good warranty. My personal brand of choice right now, if I had any money . A number of people I know have taken my recommendations on the Samsungs, and haven't regretted it (yet...)
• Hitachi: Hard to predict. Some great, some crap. As it happens, I own an 80GB SATA Hitachi drive - a 7K250 - the performance is good, 'tis warmer running than I'd like (even more so than my beloved Seagate Barracuda IV, which is surprising as that's heavily padded), and not as quiet as I'd like (the aforementioned Seagate is essentially silent, and that's my benchmark) - it's not too bad. Certainly not as rattly as the Maxtors, anyway.

All I can add is the following:

SATA II is different to SATA I; 300MB/s maximum speed, passthrough cables (i.e. daisy-chaining drives), NCQ as standard, few other things. Don't know if the connectors have changed; do a google.

Why are you going with 80GB drives? I doubt that's the best prices per GB these days, another forty or fifty euro or so would double your outright capacity. Then you could mirror them instead of striping them

Good luck with it...
Gadget

Khannie

Thanks for the replies lads.

Inspector: Nice one. Lovely post. Thanks for that. Didn't know the seagates came with a 5 year warranty. That could sway me in that direction, though I like the idea of SATA2 now. See below for why I'm getting 2x80 GB drives.

Vishal: My own 160GB hard drive is on its way out. I want to replace it (but use it as backup). I want RAID 0 because I hate waiting for the OS to boot and for UT2004 to load, also I'll be able to take the drives with me when I upgrade everything towards the end of next year (with UT2007 comes out hopefully).

I wouldn't have bothered upgrading anything until then, but this seems like a decent chance to get a nice performance boost for not too much money.

irlrobins: Thanks for the linkage.

Khannie

Had crumbled and decided to get two 160GB samsungs, had them in my cart, then stupid jes says:

"This is currently the only payment method available to use on this order.: Money Order" :rolleyes:

No love for you!

vishal

samsungs are very good, quiet and reliable

Wertz

There were 2 Maxtor 160gb HDDs in my comp when it arrived, running in RAID0...but you can't hear them. There's a setting in the BIOS that allows you to run them in silent mode for a slight reduction in speed. I turned it off to see what kind of noise they made and hastily turned the quiet option back on.
I'm not sure if this is a feature of the mobo (dell) or the drives, but I like it a lot.

Malafus

Wertz wrote:

There were 2 Maxtor 160gb HDDs in my comp when it arrived, running in RAID0...but you can't hear them. There's a setting in the BIOS that allows you to run them in silent mode for a slight reduction in speed. I turned it off to see what kind of noise they made and hastily turned the quiet option back on.
I'm not sure if this is a feature of the mobo (dell) or the drives, but I like it a lot.

Tis a feature of the drives. The newer Maxtors have a choice of 3 settings, "Loud", "Not-So-Loud" and "Quiet, but it will take 20 minutes to boot your OS" . Not-So-Loud is the best compromise between speed and quietness, but TBPH, I'm sick of Maxtor drives. I've had two, and both have "stuck", when spinning up initially, many times. They can be fixed - by hitting them - but it's a pain having to do it every few months, and I fear for my data.

Samsungs are my preferred, ATM. They have the fastest seek time, at least on the benchmarks I saw. But AFAIK, Seagate drives are the quietest.
Buying Hitachi is Russian Roulette at the moment.

uberpixie

Khannie wrote:

Thanks for the replies lads.

Vishal: My own 160GB hard drive is on its way out. I want to replace it (but use it as backup). I want RAID 0 because I hate waiting for the OS to boot and for UT2004 to load, also I'll be able to take the drives with me when I upgrade everything towards the end of next year (with UT2007 comes out hopefully).

I wouldn't have bothered upgrading anything until then, but this seems like a decent chance to get a nice performance boost for not too much money.

irlrobins: Thanks for the linkage.

Another option is a raptor 74 gig....

Less trouble than raid 0 and a lot less likely to feck up. Granted 74 gig ain't huge, but its enough for your os and all your main games.

From my 2 friends experiences with them they are the business and have made a huge difference to their loading times.

Khannie

Are those raptors really as good as the money you pay for them? They're feckin' expensive yokes! Would it approach raid0 speeds on "normal" drives?

Has anyone else had that trouble with jes before? I would have bought yesterday tbh.

Peteee

I'd stay away from Hitachi. I had a Hitachi head crash on me a month ago, barely 18 months old.

Try Western Digital drives too. Mines running perfectly, and my friends swear by them.

Khannie

Khannie wrote:

Has anyone else had that trouble with jes before? I would have bought yesterday tbh.

I emailed JES asking if I could pay by paypal, got a (very fast) response saying they would only take money order as they'd had trouble in the past. :eek:

TBH, if they're not going to accept automatic payment, they can wave goodbye to most of their Irish business (I certainly CBA organising bank transfers, etc.).

Khannie

Ok, just got the final word back from JES on credit card / paypal via PM.

Here's what they said:

Jes Computer wrote:

Hi,
we had many problems with paypal in the last few weeks, so we decided to disable this function.
I´m sorry i have to tell you that we can´t offer payment via creditcard at the moment until further notice.
Payment via bank transfer is of course still available.

Regards

JES Computer
Webshop Team

That's a real pity tbh. I've gotten stuff off them in the past, and they're a cheap and reliable seller.

Malafus

uberpixie wrote:

Another option is a raptor 74 gig....

Less trouble than raid 0 and a lot less likely to feck up. Granted 74 gig ain't huge, but its enough for your os and all your main games.

From my 2 friends experiences with them they are the business and have made a huge difference to their loading times.

Khannie wrote:

Are those raptors really as good as the money you pay for them? They're feckin' expensive yokes! Would it approach raid0 speeds on "normal" drives?

Has anyone else had that trouble with jes before? I would have bought yesterday tbh.

One 10,000RPM drive will not be as quick as two 7,200RPM drives in a striped array... Plus you get SFA storage for your money. You'd be better off getting 2 decent 7,200RPM drives, and raid 10 -ing them - it'd be faster than a 10,000RPM, cheaper for the storage you get, and you'd have redundancy in case of a crash

Inspector Gadget

Doesn't RAID 10 require four drives???

Gadget

jozi

I got a Samsung 160gig hd. I remember buying it because at the time it seemed the best value for money and noise. I also have a 80gig maxtor, i can compare the 2 later when i get home if you want?
As for Jes i have no love for them since trouble with rma's.
Have a look here Khannie, not much more expensive than Jes and good service.

Jozi

Khannie

Yup, it does. And I wont be buying four drives.

Khannie

Jozi: Would have gone with Komplett ages ago, but they don't have any Socket A mobos with RAID capability and I'm having trouble getting a 2nd hand one (ebay prices are very close to the new price). Trying to avoid paying for delivery twice. Looking at dabs at the moment. The A7N8X-E Deluxe looks like the one for me (currently have the A7N8X-X).

Malafus

Stupid me :P

I didn't actually know raid 10 required 4 drives. It's called Stripe/Mirror, so I assumed you could use two and it would write that same data on both, in stripes, so that you'd get the performance benefit with redundancy. Ah well, you know what they say, "To assume makes an ass out of u and me", well, just me in this case.

Edit: Raid 1 does the job fine, AFAICS.

jozi

I've used overclockers a few times to, not bad for delivery. (maybe a little expensive)
I have a A7N8X-E-DLX for my htpc (when i get round to building it) you wont be disapointed with it. Over clocked the cpu i had very well and best thing it has (well nearlly) is the dolbly pro logic chip which is the main reason it goin into my htpc.

Jozi

EDIT: Does 2 SATA ports not mean its RAID compatible? 2 mobo's on kompletts website both have sata

Khannie

Jozi: You want to swap that mobo for the non deluxe one + dedicated 5.1 sound card + cash? Say 20 euro?

Malfus: Don't sweat it. I think you need 1+0 for the speed benefit though. RAID 1 just provides the mirroring AFAIK.

Malafus

Jozi: SATA support does not necessarily mean RAID support.

Khannie: Raid 1+0 is the same thing as Raid 10, I think you are thinking of 0+1 (there is a difference) and AFAIK, this would work, but RAID 1 would work as well, as according to Wikipedia:

RAID 1... When reading both disks can be accessed independently. Like RAID 0 the average seek time is reduced by half when randomly reading but because each disk has the exact same data the requested sectors can always be split evenly between the disks and the seek time remains low. The transfer rate would also be doubled. For three disks the seek time would be a third and the transfer rate would be tripled.

Khannie

Yeah, knew raid 10 = 1+0, just think that notation is confusing to those who don't and who might think it meant "RAID ten".

So....I did some more reading (learning loads today ). Raid1 does indeed offer twice the read performance IF the the controller supports simultaneous reads (which you would hope most hardware controllers would).

SouperComputer

So....I did some more reading (learning loads today ). Raid1 does indeed offer twice the read performance IF the the controller supports simultaneous reads (which you would hope most hardware controllers would).

well it provides a better peak load, but not seek time. That said at peak load your bottleneck would be the PCI bus! Launch of apps, bootup and suchlike rely on a low seektime to get the information they need.

personally, id go with the raptor overall but if you really wanna RAID em, go with samsung.

It funny, my experiences with drives mirror exactly what Inspector Gaget said!

Malafus

I think I have tripled my knowledge of RAID arrays today.... but Soupercomputer, the wikipedia article specifically states that seek times are halved (avg. seek times). This would make perfect sense, at least to me. You are correct though, the bottleneck becomes the Interface.

astrofool

That would be sequential seeks, after the first seek, providing the controller is still busy processing a previous seek. Raid won't give any improvement to the initial first seek latency (obviously).

Back to the question at hand, I bought some 300gig 16mb Maxtors back in March from Komplett, and have been very happy with them, getting 120+ mb transfers from them, though it takes a few days to get used to their sound, compared to say a WD Caviar (not louder, just different).

Be warned, I had issues die to my nForce Raid controller, that needed a firmware/bios update to fix with them (cos they were NCQ enabled, and had 16 meg of cache).

Khannie

My feckin' head's MELTED now.

Ok, I've been looking to buy the A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo, because it has a RAID controller on it, but as it turns out, this is a software raid implementation, and finding actual throughput for RAID0 versus a single disc seems impossible.

I then went looking at standalone controller cards, but if the PCI bus is going to be a limiting factor (theoretical max on a 33MHz bus seems to be 133MB/s), wth use are they?

I just want very fast OS load and app load that don't cost lots of CPU cycles.

Stephen

Now that we have PCI-Express, can you get PCI-E RAID controllers that could take advantage of the much greater bandwidth of the PCI-Express bus?

uberpixie

Khannie wrote:

My feckin' head's MELTED now.

Ok, I've been looking to buy the A7N8X-E Deluxe mobo, because it has a RAID controller on it, but as it turns out, this is a software raid implementation, and finding actual throughput for RAID0 versus a single disc seems impossible.

I then went looking at standalone controller cards, but if the PCI bus is going to be a limiting factor (theoretical max on a 33MHz bus seems to be 133MB/s), wth use are they?

I just want very fast OS load and app load that don't cost lots of CPU cycles.

I will say again raptor 74 gig :-)

Raid is only worth it if you have a good hardware controller and it is setup right.

The main problem with raid is that if when it messes up you loose all data on both harddrives.

When you consider that every write to the hard drives, the information is split between both.

A little funk and there's gonna be a lot of tears.

I have had friends that were initially very pleased with raid striping and then not so pleased when it eat their systems.

Raid mirroring on the other hand is quite handy...

A raptor is easy to setup and is less likely to mess up than raid.

Any friend that I know that has one is very pleased with the performance.

If I had enough room in my shuttle box to fit a 2nd harddrive properly it would be a raptor.

Without doubt.

Khannie

Actually think I will go with the raptor now. One raptor now + SATA card, then one later in RAID0 when I need extra performance / space. Just checked the specs. 4.5ms seek time = :eek:. All the reviews were 5 out of 5.