3 old drives in RAID0 vs 1 newish drive.

[disk_thrasher]

Hi.

Recently aquired a pair of 250Gb hard drives, can't remember the make/model number, but looked at benchmarks and they seem to be fairly fast for oldish drives (about 100Mb per second, on the fastest part). Currently running them in software RAID0, ran some benchmarks, they get better numbers in this config than the main drive in that machine, a 1Tb Spinpoint, F3 I think.

Had a look on ebay, and I could add another matching 250Gb drive for not much cash, and the resulting array would destroy the Spinpoint in benchmarks, but wondering if you guys think the array would be faster or slower for loading games from than the Spinpoint.

I understand RAID0 is risky, but really don't care. It's not an issue for me to throw the dead drive out the window and reinstall a few games.

 

[giantbucket]

how much storage space you need? two or three 250G hard drives are awfully wasteful of physical drive space and power cables in... what year is it now, 2015? an SSD would be way faster and take up far less space. can you live with 240G or so of storage space? that's $100.

 

[popatim]

Compare the benchmarks for the 4k random reads and writes

 

[disk_thrasher]

giantbucket

An SSD would be nice, but would use up money I would rather spend on other things (fixing my motorbike, after an event I find it hard to explain in family friendly language). The 250 Gb drives I have now cost nothing, and another from ebay is really cheap.

EDIT: I have loads of storage space, got a pile of other drives with the 250Gb ones, put them in my file server.

popatim:

The scores for 4K random are roughly equal. The sequential is far better for the array. Am I missing something, or does that make the array better?

 

[Cvdasf]

I dont see why not go for it! just know that they wont last a very long time.. But if that doesnt matter then there wont be a problem 😀

 

[popatim]

popatim:

The scores for 4K random are roughly equal. The sequential is far better for the array. Am I missing something, or does that make the array better?

Sure sounds like it does to me. Enjoy!