One 7200 RPM SATA II HDD or Two 7200 RPM Hard Drives in Striped Raid Array?

[ZokesPro]

Fine. I doubt loading times are reduced because of the RAID.

Sounds like you've never had a system with RAID 0 before. There is a difference, it's not huge but it's there , enough to be noticed and to want to keep running a RAID array. You should try it out just for the hell of it and give me some feedback about your thoughts on RAID 0, I'd be very interested in reading what you have to say.

Fragmentation, paging & page file location, currently running programs, and placement of program on the platter are all much bigger players.

I 100% agree with that above statement.

[dZeus]

maybe it's not really related at all, but you might want to give this a thought:
I used to play quake3 online a bit, and I always was on the map first after a mapchange. I could collect items and stuff up to 5-15 seconds before others dropped on the map, which was a significant lead in securing strategic powerups like armor and 100 bonus health. People kept bugging me why I was loading so much faster etc. when they had very fast computers and the latest and greatest IDE drives (at about 40GB at the time). My pc wasn't all that fast back then, the 2 factors that helped me greatly were a 4,5GB SCSI drive with quite a bit lower access time than nearly all IDE drives on the market and a very low latency internet connection.

So.... in my experience, transfer rates aren't decisive at all in load times for the game(s) I've played and seen major differences in these load times between different setups. I really don't think you'd like a small performance increase (I'm sure that RAID0 helps somewhat for lots of stuff, but not nearly as much as you hope it'll do) at the cost of exponential increase in risk of dataloss. And give that article linked by Jammrock a good read. If it won't convince you, at least it'll satisfy us in giving you enough information to base your choice on

[Nowhere]

btw, I noticed that new 36GB SCSI drive + 80MB/s adaptec controller (this one doesn't have to be new in my book...) cost significantly less than 36GB Raptor here...I would almost consider this if it wasn't for the noise (and the little detail that when it comes to money I'm currently at -200€...)

edit: but also...SCSI drives (and Raptor - I've heard it's mechanical part is direct descendant of SCSI drives) are, in opposition to ATA, still built to last, right? That could be worth it...

[GT98]

I had a RAID 0 setup on my previous PC (now my server) and there wasn't much of any difference in Boot speed vs running one drive. The biggest problem is that when you boot, any time savings from the RAID is negated by the time that it takes for it to go though the BIOS on the RAID controller. I pefer booting off a single fast drive, like I have now...a 10K raptor drive

[Wombat]

Sounds like you've never had a system with RAID 0 before. ....I'd be very interested in reading what you have to say.

And that's where you'd be wrong. My system had a Promise TX2 with two 7200rpm Maxtor 80GB drives in RAID 0, and replacing them with a single 200GB Seagate was a speed improvement. Especially in boot time, since the Promise card would have to check the RAID integrity at every bootup. Other than that, its seek time appeared to be better, too. System was definitely faster off that Seagate.

[Wombat]

edit: but also...SCSI drives (and Raptor - I've heard it's mechanical part is direct descendant of SCSI drives) are, in opposition to ATA, still built to last, right? That could be worth it...

There's little difference in the mechanics of the different drive protocol families, if any, these days. But since a lot of business applications are going for SATA when they never would have gone for PATA, I feel there's even less reason for the SCSI drives to be better than SATA. Also, SAS is just around the corner, and that's SCSI over (virtually unchanged) SATA hardware.

[Nowhere]

That's because todays ATA drives are up to a level of old SCSI ones when it comes to mechanics/reliability or because SCSI began to be like ATA?

[Wombat]

A bit of both. There used to be almost no overlap in some of the technologies. For example, RPM speed:
PATA used to be at 42-5400 RPM, while SCSI was at 7200-15000 RPM. Now PATA/SATA are both generally in the 7200-10000RPM space.

The two drive families used to be designed by totally different work groups, now the mechanics are often the same, and just the controller board is different.

Now *everybody* wants bigger, faster drives. Instead of Drive X for consumers and Drive Y for the big boys, you tend to see Drive Z for the consumers, and Drive Z + RAID/SAN/something for businesses.

[Nowhere]

Hmm...so perhaps if one wants to find "good old-style reliable SCSI drive" he should look if...the drive looks totally different externally than ATA drives from the time?
I've found for example some new, cheap (not that I can afford it...) Maxtor Quantum Atlas 10K II 10000, that doesn't look like any ATA Maxtor I've seen (and Maxtor didn't have 10000 ATA...). Or this Cheetach 15000...

[Wombat]

Hmm...so perhaps if one wants to find "good old-style reliable SCSI drive" he should look if...the drive looks totally different externally than ATA drives from the time?
I've found for example some new, cheap (not that I can afford it...) Maxtor Quantum Atlas 10K II 10000, that doesn't look like any ATA Maxtor I've seen (and Maxtor didn't have 10000 ATA...). Or this Cheetach 15000...

I wouldn't consider either the Atlas 10K or the Cheetah 15K any more reliable than hardware you could buy today - because now they're physically old and used. And that 15K is a HOT drive, it's aging itself rather quickly.

Also, if you don't know, U320 is the *last* SCSI protocol. U640 has been nixed, and everything is going to go over to SAS.

[Nowhere]

This particular Atlas is new (SCSI drives have counters in them that show for how many hours the drive worked, da?)

And...what's this SAS? SCSI over SATA? What's the benefit?

[Wombat]

And...what's this SAS? SCSI over SATA? What's the benefit?

SATA has a better physical protocol. The serial stuff just works better, makes distance runs easier, and has more room to scale even faster. Also, there's cost savings in using the same hardware. SCSI on the other hand, brings lots of command features, more intelligent logic, and lots of other things. SATA borrowed a lot of smart ideas from SCSI, but not everything. Also, SCSI isn't just for drives, it talks to other types of devices as well.

[Gurm]

Also, SCSI isn't just for drives, it talks to other types of devices as well.

Yer damn skippy it does! Still got me a SCSI scanner, SCSI printer, SCSI modem, and a couple other fun SCSI devices around here somewheres!

[Wombat]

Yup, I personally work a lot with tape drives (aka "sequential media") and media changers. My favorite though is probably seeing the one for SCSI processor.

[ZokesPro]

And that's where you'd be wrong. My system had a Promise TX2 with two 7200rpm Maxtor 80GB drives in RAID 0, and replacing them with a single 200GB Seagate was a speed improvement. Especially in boot time, since the Promise card would have to check the RAID integrity at every bootup. Other than that, its seek time appeared to be better, too. System was definitely faster off that Seagate.

So you have tried it before!

Was that Seagate even comparable to the Maxtor? What if you compared the one Seagate with 2, setup in raid 0?

You really firmly believe that raid 0 doesn't offer much performance increase for regular desktop users?

I think it makes all the difference, no matter what you use it for. And with today's HDD prices and onboard controllers, why not?