Best HDD's for raid 0 ??

[izajasz]

Hello,
I was searching for some tests or benchmarks of HDD's but i ve found old ones only or partial info. I am interested in buying 2 HDDs for raid 0 to keep my files and use them to keep my less frequently played games. I ve found that there is a seagate drive that is very good performing but only 1 year warranty. Does anyone know of some recent benchmark or other places where i can find which drives are the best ?

 

[geofelt]

You might find this older report on component return rates interesting.
http://www.behardware.com/articles/843-6/components-returns-rates-5.html

Past that, I would avoid raid-0.

Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential manner.

 

[izajasz]

So , You're suggesting i should go single drive but bigger , for example 2tb one ? By the way i remember now what disk ive seen : Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1 its in toms hardware 1st place not mentioning velociraptor of course. Its awesome etc but its only year warranty. That makes me suspicious ...

 

[geofelt]

So , You're suggesting i should go single drive but bigger , for example 2tb one ? By the way i remember now what disk ive seen : Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1 its in toms hardware 1st place not mentioning velociraptor of course. Its awesome etc but its only year warranty. That makes me suspicious ...

Yes, to a 2tb drive.

Nothing wrong with 2 1tb drives either. Assuming it is economical, and you have the room.

 

[izajasz]

Now i almost decided im going to get ST1000DM003 or 2 but i have 1 more question. Will this drive be limited somehow if plugged to SATA2 connector ? And what is the h2benchw Interface performance in tosmhardware HDD charts 2012 ??

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I have used a lot of these (5 year warranty) in the 2 TB size:

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=708&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=10

For a hard drive, the Barracuda XT series offers the best performance available from a 7200 RPM mechanical storage device.

The newer model is only 3 years

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148506&Tpk=Barracuda%20XT

 

[geofelt]

Now i almost decided im going to get ST1000DM003 or 2 but i have 1 more question. Will this drive be limited somehow if plugged to SATA2 connector ? And what is the h2benchw Interface performance in tosmhardware HDD charts 2012 ??

Sata2 or sata3 is largely irrelevant for Hard drives. Performance of hard drives is mainly determined by the mechanical performance, not the performance of the interface or the amount of cache. For storage drives, the performance of hard drives is remarkably similar in actual usage.

For SSD's, the situatipn is a bit different. For the OS, which does mainly small random reads and writes, sata2 or3 makes little difference.
For sequential I/O, the faster interface of sata3 is a bit more important. But, even with sata2, a SSD will be 2x faster than any hard drive in sequential I/O.