Confusion over benchmark results

[Peaks]

Hey guys, forgive me for asking what may be seen as quite a noobish question.

I am looking into getting a new HDD (prolly gonna get two and put them in RAID 0).

I am considering both the WD cavier black 1TB and the Samsung SpinPoint F1 1 TB drives but am a bit confused about the importance of some of the benchmark results from here:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-hard-drive-charts/benchmarks,50.html

It seems that the PCVantage scores for application loading and gaming place the WD above the samsung but the min, average and max read/write throughput scores place the Samsung as faster than the WD.

What should I be going on? Which scores reflect the performance of the drives most accurately?

Cheers in advance

 

[sturm]

What little difference there is you will never notice other than in benchmarking software. Take your pick.

 

[Peaks]

ok thanks for the advice, think I will prolly go for the WD as people say they are very reliable.

 

[typerazor]

I recently bought the WD 1TB black and it has great IO but runs a little hot (sub 40*C)
Also the WD has a 5 year where as the Samsung has only 3.

 

[wuzy]

As long as it's 7200RPM (e.g. not WD or Samsung Green-stuff) then they all perform fairly closely with no noticeable difference even in RAID0 (except in rare circumstances) as mentioned by sturm. It's all all $/GB these days or 5yr warranty for enterprise-class drives.

A single SSD like X25-M on the other hand will blow you away when it comes to perceived speed difference.

 

[Peaks]

OK, with that in mind then would it be possible to have an SSD for the os and two 1TB drives in RAID 0 for storage?

 

[wuzy]

RAID0 for storage??? I would recommend you read the RAID guide to get a comprehensive understanding of how each RAID mode works and are used for.
For storage with redundancy the most common used by home-users today is RAID1 or RAID5. Otherwise JBOD will do if your data isn't of great importance (my few TBs worth of BD rips are...).

A SSD for purely OS+app is fine. 64GB is more than enough for OS+2games+3major apps with a (half) yearly clean install in between. Although non-JMF602 based SSD are still fairly expensive today in terms of $/GB, the performance increase it has over VelociRaptor is worth every cent.

 

[Peaks]

Yes you are right, RAID 1 or 5 would be better. Thanks for the advice.