Setting up cheap RAID. Advice on drives

On Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:30:03 +0100, "doddie"
wrote:


Gonna go for the Maxtors 250GB S/ATA2 7200rpm 8MB Cache (STM3250820AS)

Pc used for gaming, video converting. so not too much bothered about data
loss, as I backup my game saves
and docs to an external HD regularly.

External HDs are generally less reliable than internal due
to being hotter running, lower quality PSU, and occasional
glitches in caching causing corruption.

If you aren't bothered about data loss then why the question
at all? Drives don't generally lose data but otherwise
remain intact when internal, except in cases of buggy RAID,
but then RAID0 doubles the risk anyway.

In other words, your goals are incompatible. If you choose
RAID0 there's not much point in giving a moment's thought to
the drives you use from a reliability standpoint.




Just wondered about the reliability in general of these drives, compared to
others

So raid 0 the way to go for now, will there be much speed increase compared
to single drive?

No. This is the curious part, you are choosing RAID with
seemingly no good reason, as if it's just a thing to do.
For many uses a single, newer larger current generation
drive will be faster. For other uses, having two drives but
not raiding them will be faster.

I may be making more of an issue than it really is, but the
important distinction is that synthetic benchmarks tend to
be less relevant to real world uses, and seldom do testers
compare a RAID0 to two individual drives, they act as though
someone would only use a single drive vs a 2 drive RAID0
which is not an isolation of the *RAID* variable.


Specs...

Intel Duo E8200 oc to 3.2 ghz
2GB Crucial
512mb Asus 8800 GT TOP
XP

Frankly since it seems you have a system with some value
devoted to gaming (by the gaming video card), it would seem
to be a good idea to add more memory. Game level reloads
are much faster when the filecache has ample memory to cache
the game, and returning to other system uses after gaming it
is much faster if other files weren't flushed from the cache
(as much).

On Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:30:03 +0100, "doddie" wrote:
snip

So raid 0 the way to go for now, will there be much speed increase compared
to single drive?


Specs...

Intel Duo E8200 oc to 3.2 ghz
2GB Crucial
512mb Asus 8800 GT TOP
XP

Thanks for all the replys :-)


I'd really be interested to hear back from you as to whether you
actually see any speed improvement. I had a RAID 0 setup on a board
several years ago (dual PATA drives, not SATA) and I found it just a
bother, with no descernable improvement at all. I now have a
RAID-capable board but haven't tired setting RAID up, since my
previous experience was disappointing.

--
Charlie Hoffpauir
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~charlieh/

kony wrote:
On Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:24:13 GMT, DCA
wrote:



Ironically, that is a Seagate designed and manufactured
drive with a Maxtor label. Haven't you kept up with the
state of affairs after Maxtor was bought by Seagate?



what is? the hitachi or the samsung - neither to my knowledge!


Where in the world do you get Samsung from? The Maxtor is a
Seagate, it is fairly common knowledge among those who kept
up with such things.

Yes - I know