Recommendations on FT100 RAID0 drives?

[AndrewDV]

Hi,

Seeing Doc's spec list for his RAID0 setup made me think I need to upgrade mine

Right now, I have 2 IBM75gxp's on a Promise FT100. It is nice, but I'm always running out of space on my larger projects. After doing some searching, I see there are 60GB and 100GB IBM60gpx's on the market.

One question I have is on those drives. Are they good enough to use in a RAID0 setup? My assumption is that IBM drives are good quality.

The other question I have is more performance/money based. I have enough cash flow to get either the 2-100GB drives or 3-60GB drives. As far as performance, does 3 drives on a FT100 outperform 2 drives?

If you have any recommendations on specific drive makes/models, I certainly would appreciate that as well.

Thank you

[Dr Mordrid]

I have four 60g IBM 75GXP's on my RAID and they're doing fine, but they are early production drives.

Unfortunately many people are now reporting problems with the newer IBM's 60GXP and 75GXP drives made in various locations. Storage Review's forum, among others, are showing quite a few reports of early failure and even of replacement drives failing soon after installation.

While I haven't had any problems with mine I've seen enough to stop recommending them to others. Making matters worse in my mind is IBM's rather lame responses to my inquiries into this problem.

Now for a recommendation:

I've been using Maxtor drives in most of my systems as boot, scratch and RAID drives for several years and have yet to have one fail. I think I have somewhere over 30 of them humming away currently.

Another point for Maxtor:

they recently purchsed Quantum and several of their new models are Quantum designs that didn't make it to market before the buyout.

'nuff said.

Dr. Mordrid

[AndrewDV]

Doc,

Thanks for the reply.

I've read that the FT100 tops out performance wise around 3 drives. Do you think there is any advantage (ie consistency) of having 4 drives?

Thanks

[Karen St Martin]

I agree with Doc. I have 13 Maxtor drives in use on my systems and have yet to have a problem with them.

Karen

[Frank Marshall]

What about Western Digital?

I've never built a RAID array but it surprises me that whenever the talk turns to hard drives around here Western Digital never get a mention. They consistently top the leader boards at Storage Review and are usually in the same price range as the Maxtors rather than the expensive (and now troubled) IBMs.

It was on Storage Review's advice that I bought a 40gig 7200rpm WD400BB and I'm very happy with it. They now have 80 and 100gig equivalents which are again topping the leaderboard over at Storage Review. Something to think about...

[IM_Riktar]

I have used Western Digital drives in the past and was happy with the performance from them.

My number 1 reason for staying with Maxtor involved a mishap with my first purchase of some Maxtor 13 gig harddrives for a bigger raid 0 array.

One of the drives failed in the array about 8 months after installing them. A quick call to Maxtor's tollfree number had me running a quick (5 min) diagnostic that the operator walked me through. After giving the codes to the operator I was told one of the drives had indeed gone bad.

After I gave the operator my credit card # to ensure I would indeed return the bad harddive I was told that a new drive would be drop shipped to me.

Sure enough, 2 days later I received the replacement. Now I should state that the replacement drive was a "Factory reconditioned" drive. Refurbished by other standards. The replacement drive had the same warranty as the new one. Both drives never gave me another problem. As a matter of point, they are still working fine today in 2 other computers I have built. The replacements in my raid array are Maxtor 7200RPM units which work just fine.

I don't know if Western Digital, IBM, or anyone else has this kind of program.

By the way, my credit card was never charged, or hit by Maxtor since I shipped back the drive in the alloted time (30 days).

Out of 7 drives I have since purchased for myself and other folks none of them has had any issues that would cause me to look elsewhere. It is nice to know that IF you do have a problem Maxtor will take care of it.

And that is the main reason I am staying with Maxtor.

[Karen St Martin]

I completely agree with the comments about Maxtor's customer service. When I bought a Maxtor drive a year or so ago, it didn't have one of the special UDMA 80 pin cables. That was the first I had ever heard of special cables so I called Maxtor support to find out what was going on.

Not only did the tech explain it to me, he sent me the UDMA cable, by UPS 2 day!! Now *that* is customer service. I stay with Maxtor as long as they people like that tech around!!

Karen

[Dr Mordrid]

Because of WD's firmware problems a couple of years ago I've avoided them since. Also, those Maxtor drives haven't given me a reason to replace them so.....

I did recently buy a WD drive for use as a removable boot drive in the beta system though. I have it triple bootted with Win98SE/Win2K SP-2/XP and it seems to work fine there.

As far as RAID's go, here is how it works out;

With the Fasttraks up to and including the FT100 and TX2 there is are the following speed increases when adding drives to a RAID0 array;

where X = unbuffered sequential write speed of a single drive

2 drives = 2X
3 drives = 2.5X
4 drives = 2.5X+ (basically no real speed increase)

This is due to the master/slave situation that exists.

With the Fasttrak TX4 the situation is different as it does not use master/slave drives. It uses two ASIC's (Promise chipsets) to provide FOUR master connections with no slaves allowed. The following are the speed increases I've experienced in a TX4 RAID0 array;

2 drives = 2X
3 drives = 2.9X
4 drives = 3.1X+ (very fast drives; due to PCI bus saturation)
4 drives = 3.8X+ (slower drives & therefor not PCI bus limited)

The uppance? With four IBM 75GXP's I get the following R/W numbers both in SANDRA and in the RT-2000's HD benchmark;

sustained sequential writes: 90-94 mb/s
sustained sequential reads: 96-98 mb/s

As noted for the 4X speed; with the fastest of drives the array is saturating the PCI bus and artificially reducing the 4 drive readings with these drives.

Since the TX4 can run on either a PCI/33 or PCI/66 slot (64 bit PCI, those found on server boards) it should greatly benefit from the increased bus bandwidth PCI/66 slots provide (up to 250 mb/s).

This card takes the term "throughput overkill" to a new extreme.

Dropped frame? Whazzat??

Dr. Mordrid