RAID0

flashive

flashive

Obliviot
I'm looking into buying a whole new system for myself. I'll mostly be using it for gaming and watching (perhaps encoding movies)

I like it when my games/windows loads quick so I was thinking about getting some of those WD Raptors and putting them in RAID0. Is that a viable option now that solidstatedrives are becoming cheaper or would it be better to wait a year and see what the market is doing then.

And would it make a significant difference when booting up windows xp compared to a normal 250GB SATA 7200 RPM?
 
B

BCCZeus

Obliviot
You will find that using a new 500GB, 750GB or 1TB drive is almost as fast as a Raptor - especially the 750GB and higher because they use perpendicular recording. The 750GB drive is priced almost the same as the 150GB Raptor and you'll see very close to the same performance and have a butt-load more storage. With perpendicular recording, the only thing the Raptor can offer is lower seek times. Sustained transfer is now as fast on a large drive.
 
Greg King

Greg King

I just kinda show up...
Staff member
I have been running tests for an upcoming article on RAID and in all honesty, you are not going to notice any surprising differances between Raptors and a regular SATA II drive. I personally do not like sacrificing storage for minimal gains in drive performance. That said, the Raptor line does offer the fastest performance, but you'll have to ask yourself if it's worth it to give up the extra space.

I would save your money and get a pair of regular old SATA drives and RAID 0 them if you want the best bang for your buck. And perpendicular recording is found on many drives, not just the 750GB and up drives and it adds virtually no performance to the drive but rather allows more data to be crammed into the same amount of platter space.
 
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