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Hard drives

Khannie

Ok lads.....I want speed for my OS drive.

Here's the goof. I recently sold these:
1 x 74G raptor
1 x 320G seagate 7200.10

and I kept
2 x 200G samsungs and put them in raid 1.

I thought the raid 1 would give me striping for read, but it doesn't. I do get 2 x throughput if I access two files at once, but that's a rarity on a home machine.

So I benchmarked the other two. The raptor and the seagate actually performed similarly. The seagate edged out the raptor for single file transfer, but was noticeably worse for multiple file reads (obviously because of the seek times).

The samsungs are /ok/, but I want good. I think for the money I could do better than the raptor. Let's say my budget is 200 euro.

Oh, I have 3 x 750G drives in raid 5. These perform STELLARLY for reads (150MB/s average). Not so great for writes.

Advice plz.

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PogMoThoin

This or this. 8.9ms average seek time. As good as a raptor @ nice price

Khannie

Hmmmm. That F1 looks very fast on toms alright.

It might be overkill size-wise for my OS drive, given that I already have 1.5TB of redundant storage.

I /could/ add it to my raid array and use that for my OS and storage. This would be hassle (involving a deconstruction of the array, then a rebuild). I went for the cheapest drives for the raid 5 array though (these hitachi's) because I wasn't concerned about its performance at the time.

GAH! ALL THESE OPTIONS!

/me tears his few remaining hairs out

SouperComputer

www.storagereview.com

Khannie

I had found that site yesterday alright. It's actually lacking reviews of some of the newer sata drives. No mention of the F1 on it at all.

SouperComputer

Haven't checked the site in a while, its a great resource, even if its a bit behind.

FWIW, I bought a 500Gb Baracuda 11 series for the new HTPC and it pi$$es all over my Maxtor Atlas 76GB Ultra320 SCSI drive in both peak and sustained transfer. Not sure on access time but it was pretty close on that too. When I say Pi$$ed I mean 25-30% faster! In emulated UDMA 100mode. So cache burst would be better in native SATA2 mode.

Well impressed, even if the SCSI drive is licking its wounds!

Stick some of these bad boys in the rack, you wont be dissapointed.

Anti

why not get a SSD drive or a few and raid them. May be a bit out of your budget though.

awhir

Anti wrote: »

why not get a SSD drive or a few and raid them. May be a bit out of your budget though.

a bit :eek::eek:

L31mr0d

Anti wrote: »

why not get a SSD drive or a few and raid them. May be a bit out of your budget though.

I don't think he's about to drop 2k on 32GB of space.

can I ask why RAID 0 isn't an option? I mean if its only the OS drive trhere really isn't anything to lose, just ghost an image of it onto your redundant storage.

Also is this a hardware RAID or software? If hardware what RAID card are you using.

Anti

L31mr0d wrote: »

I don't think he's about to drop 2k on 32GB of space.

can I ask why RAID 0 isn't an option? I mean if its only the OS drive trhere really isn't anything to lose, just ghost an image of it onto your redundant storage.

Also is this a hardware RAID or software? If hardware what RAID card are you using.

Um... Since when are 32gb SSD drives 2k ?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=558790

Thats abaout 330€

Chosen

He's either using his motherboard's RAID controller ("firmware RAID") or a bad RAID card. And I said "bad", cause good RAID controllers stripe the reads on a RAID1 (mirror) as well.
For example, here is a single I-ram:

Notice the stable 135Mb/sec read.

Now two of these babies in a mirror-set (RAID1) on ICH9R:

Not exactly double read performance, but very close (265Mb/sec).

I also had this dillema about my OS drive and I ended up buying a Memoright 16Gb SSD for ~330€ and I am more than happy. I get 90Mb/sec read and 100Mb/sec write continuous and throughout the whole capacity of the drive.
And yes, my next upgrade will be another one of them

For this money someone might say "why not 2x Raptors?". My answer is:
a) It's 100Mb/sec from the first to the last byte of the drive, not 75Mb/sec in the beggining of the Raptor and downwards to 40Mb/sec to the last sectors.
b) 16Gb is more than enought for my Windows XP installation + Unreal Tournament 2007 + 4.5Gb free space for DVD ripping, which btw is a joy with a Quad at 3600MHz and an SSD

c) Because when I upgrade and put another one of these babies and make a RAID0, no Raptor, SCSI, SAS RAID array will be able to achieve these numbers

d) System boots to desktop in ~10 seconds

Here's my baby:

L31mr0d

Anti wrote: »

Um... Since when are 32gb SSD drives 2k ?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=558790

Thats abaout 330€

sorry, i was thinking about these ones

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3167

Chosen

L31mr0d wrote: »

sorry, i was thinking about these ones

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3167

Yeap, these also cost €300 incl VAT per 16Gb: http://www.ssdisk.eu/mobi_3000_25_16.php
No way near €2k per 32Gb

L31mr0d

Chosen wrote: »

Yeap, these also cost €300 incl VAT per 16Gb: http://www.ssdisk.eu/mobi_3000_25_16.php
No way near €2k per 32Gb

last time I checked SSD Drives where a lot more expensive. Plus the ones I was talking about where the 7000 series, which are nearly twice the price of the 3000 series.

It might not be 2k, but €800 is still a lot to pay for 32GB. I'd much rather prefer quantity over quality when it comes to HDDs. If it was a choice between 3x1TB drives or 1 of those 32GB drives, i'd take the 3 terabytes any day.

Chosen

The conversation was for OS drives, nobody needs 3Tb for their OS.
And since the conversation keeps going around Raptors, SSD, SAS and 15k disks, you probably already got the hint that we are not really talking about capacity or quantity

Khannie

So I thought this thread had died a death and haven't checked back on it in a while. I ended up buying an SAS drive and controller for reasonable money on ebay. I had spoken with chosey about SSD, but it's just a bit beyond my budget. He's sure to be cranky with me.

The raid I'm using is the software raid built into the linux kernel because it doesn't tie me to a specific controller and is generally very performant (the raid 5 churns out around 150-160MB/s for reads which I found very impressive). The raid 1 is more aimed at enterprise it seems. I fully expected it to stripe reads and tbh, am pissed that it doesn't. It does provide twice the throughput if you're reading two files at once, but that just doesn't happen very often in the home environment.

Raid 0 is an option, but the drives I have are 2 years old iirc. I just wanted the redundancy of raid1 with the performance of raid 0 (but was prepared to sacrifice the space).

Edit: Yeah, for what it's worth, I only /need/ around 4-6G for my OS drive. I could probably get by with 2 if I maintained it properly, so SSD was definitely on the cards for space, just not for budget.

L31mr0d

Chosen wrote: »

The conversation was for OS drives, nobody needs 3Tb for their OS.
And since the conversation keeps going around Raptors, SSD, SAS and 15k disks, you probably already got the hint that we are not really talking about capacity or quantity

Depends on your OS drive I guess, I tried running a RAID 0 with 2x36GB Raptors before and found I ran out of space fast. Now with Vista taking up more space and game installs hitting 10GB each, capacity is a premium. Plus it got irritating having to always redirect my game installs to another drive

I found the extra speed of the raptors redundant as I wanted it for downloading and extracting rar archives, but I didn't have the space to download more than a couple of rar archives to my OS drive.

What would be the best balance between performance and capacity? I'm going to be rebuilding my array in the next few months and was thinking about just adding another 320GB WD SATA2 into the array and making it a hardware RAID? Would that be the best option?

Anti

i find my 166 sammy 500gb drivers the best option. Fast read and write ( better then my two raptors ) and completly silent.

TheThreeDegrees

Chosen wrote: »

Yeap, these also cost €300 incl VAT per 16Gb: http://www.ssdisk.eu/mobi_3000_25_16.php
No way near €2k per 32Gb

I was thinking of ordering 5 of these and that would mean they would pay for shipping.

For the free shipping you order a max of 2 of the 3000 series and I guess 3 of the 7000 series.

Anyone want to go dutch?

I will find out the final price in the coming days.Should be able to get good discount.

This technology is not gonna get cheaper in the coming months.You have to wait for the BIG hardware vendors to milk it first before the consumer gets decent prices.

TheThreeDegrees

Well just as I wrote this I got the prices in.

If anyone is interested please let me know via PM which size you are interested in.

Feck the graphic cards.these are the dogs..you know what!

Chosen

TheThreeDegrees wrote: »

This technology is not gonna get cheaper in the coming months.You have to wait for the BIG hardware vendors to milk it first before the consumer gets decent prices.

Heh guess again

The Mtron Mobi 16Gb was priced at 300€ only two weeks ago, and when Samsung anounced their new SSD lineup, the price dropped to €255.
Now that more big guns are entering the SSD market, we should see more price drops

TheThreeDegrees

yep €269 is on their website ex vat for the mobi 3000.
afraid the Pro 7000 is on back order till the end of december.
I'm gonna order 2 of the mobi 3000 16GB now and have a play with them.
see ya.;)

OK ordered.Should have them both for Friday.Got them to fedex them over.

One of them is on offer to the lads on this board because you offer very good advice and its been a pleasure learning from you.
I will only ask for the cost(what I paid trade price).no shipping no vat.

PM if interested.