Advice on Sata 3.0 and Raid 0

[JRMACARTNEY]

Hi Guys,

I am trying to get some advice on upgrading my storage system. I currently have 1 Patriot Torqx PFZ128GS25SSDR 2.5" 128GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - Retail. I am looking to upgrade and I'm not sure if I should get another of the same drive and run raid 0 or if I should just go with 2 HITACHI Ultrastar C10K300 HUC103014CSS600 (0B23700) 147GB 10000 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5" Enterprise Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive and run them Raid 0.

Thanks for your help / advice.

John

 

[sub mesa]

You want to 'upgrade' from an SSD to a HDD?

I cannot make out of your story what you're going to use this for; so any advice is premature.

 

[JRMACARTNEY]

Well I thought the transfer rate of the SATA 3 may put those 10k Hitachi's in the running with my SSD.

General home computer. Gaming, music & video editing, nothing crazy

 

[sub mesa]

Since HDDs have trouble reaching 150MB/s; using SATA 6Gbps (600MB/s) won't affect performance much. Also, sequential performance is only relevant if you do basic copy tasks alot. For the system drive, containing applications and the OS, random IOps performance is much more important.

Below screenshot gives a nice idea why SSDs are so much faster than HDDs:

source: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3607&p=4

As you can see random IOps performance is much higher than any HDD is capable of. No harddrive can even reach 1MB/s when doing REAL random I/O. So forget those 100MB+ scores you'll only get that when doing simple copy tasks. Its IOps that matters.

Perhaps you should read about what SSDs are and what benefits they have over HDDs, before you proceed any further.

 

[JRMACARTNEY]

Gotcha. I can see the smarter choice then will be SSD. I think I'll add another Torqx and raid them.

Thanks for your time and help.