Hi folks, I am thinking of upgrading my hard disk and have a few options, but what would be the fastest configuration in terms of pure speed? Option 1: 1x Western Digital VelociRaptor 10000rpm SATA-II 150GB 16MB, or Option 2: 2x Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200rpm SATA-II in RAID-0 I cant afford to buy 2 VelociRaptors and raid them together, and if I could I wouldn't need to ask this question. Both options cost about the same, that is 1 VelociRaptor 150GB for same price as 2 Seagate 500GB drives. I sincerely appreciate any help and advice. Many thanks, Shane.
You should definately decided for 2x500gb raid 0. But Why you want Seagate ? I have a Samsung HD502HJ and it's the fastest hdd i ever seen AFAIK is even faster that seagate 500gb 7200.12 - i have seagate 7200.12 320mb and it has only 91MB/s average speed instead of ~114 my samsung I had Seagate 7200.11 320gb and i had bad experience about it ;/
Stay away from the Sagate drives. Renowned for problems. Ok you get large capacity with the Seagate drives but if its quality and reliabillity you want, its got to be the Western Digital. Both drives can deliver a maximum of 3gb/s via SATA and i dont think there is very much difference in the write speed of the drives.
more is better Hello there, a little late on this thread, but more disks in a stripe will give you more speed ( up to the max of the input/output of the SATA interface, 3 GB in this case). A array of 4 100 GB 7200 disks will be quite speedy.
Saying the maximum speed is 3gb/s is a little misleading, ANY sata drive is capable of this! The best drives at the moment are the Samsung's, they're a good balance of speed, price, and reliability. They have recently released a new generation (the hd502HJ is part of that generation) but even the old generation are still some of the best drives available! Two things to take in mind: 1. Platter size 2. Mainstream vs 'green' drives A hard drive is essentially a casing and software/hardware mechanisms combining together one or more platters inside the drive. A 640gb drive is practically the same as a 320gb drive but with an extra platter inside for example! Drive casings can have up to 5 platters inside, but its definitely not recommended to go above 3 for heat concerns, unless you go for a slower drive like the 2tb (4 platter) WD drive. The size of the platter makes a big difference to the speed of the drive. The higher the capacity of each platter, the faster the drive! This is because if you have a single 500gb platter, such as the HD502HJ, for each revolution there is more data below the heads. This is known as areal density, the higher the better and faster performance you will get for the same number of reloutions & cache (I mean just comaping a 16mb cache drive to another 16mb cache drive, and 32mb to a 32mb). The second consideration is 'green' drives. Western digital have released a lot of 'green' drives lately. They're an ok drive, but they aren't as fast and focus on using the lowest power possible not having the highest speed possible. The green drives cost around the same or slightly more than the normal Samsung drives (at least here in Australia), which makes the Samsung drives the superior choice. The mainstream WD drives are known as 'blue' drives - I've seen very few of these recently, and the performance range 'black' drives. The black drives are very expensive in comparison and even the Samsung drives still beat the black drives in most cases! Considering the highest platter size available (500gb), this limits you to either the HD502HJ (500gb drive) or the HD103SJ (1tb drive, aka essentially 2xHD502HJ). I'd seriously recommend the HD103SJ, just ensure you get them from a value place. In Australia a cheap place is AUS$88, a very quick look online the same drive in the US at a cheap place is around US$75, quite a good deal!
People are full of opinions, only benchmarks tell the story of drive/array performance. Do your research on Toms and storagreview, etc....you'll find it's not so clear cut. Currently the highest continous transfer rate from a single 7200RPM sata drive I've personally tested with HD tune/atto/crystal/sandra is the seagate 500GB single platters 7200.12 streaming just under 140MB/sec from a single drive and 260MB/sec in 2 x 500GB 7200.12 striped 64k stripes according to HDTune . (on ICHR10 ism 8.8.x) CC38 firmware. Paid $49 for each 500GB 7200.12, 4 in RAID 10 give me 250+ MB/ sec across my entire primary partition of 250GB and 15 ms access times. I have 24 of the 7200.12 500GB drives so far, not one has failed or had a single smart tick yet and all run 24/7/365 (2 different firmwares the 35 and 38)......I was one of those who also owned dozens of deathstars when they came out,....every one of them died eventually and IBM went out of the HDD business....and me too almost.