Recently I got an Asus P4P800 mobo (onboard sata raid from springdale ICH5R), and I've been thinking my next upgrade should be drives for a raid array.
I was thinking about a rather pricey but awesome setup -- dual WDC raptors in raid 0. A friend has this setup and its very fast.
However, tonight something else occurred to me. I currently have and use a single WD800JB. With the immense price of raptors, for about $50 (canadian $) less, I could buy two more WD800JBs <b>and</b> a Promise PCI IDE RAID card.
What I'm wondering is, what would perform better?
The $50 is an issue for me.. but I could afford the raptors just by waiting a little longer. However, if the 3xJB setup can match the raptors in performance, I might as well do that considering it costs less.
I suppose it would have an affect on performance that 2 of the 3 JB drives would be on the same channel (woo, I read the FAQ! ), since the card I can afford and would get has two channels.
Rediculous as it sounds to some of you -- storage space is not an issue. I use my system for gaming and programming as well as simple web tasks, and currently my 80gb drive is nowhere near full. The slightly smaller size of a 2x raptor array would present no problem, and the much larger size of the 3xJB array would just be unused for the time being.
Also a factor worth looking at is that SATA cables are so deliciously small and compact.. and enough IDE cables for those three JBs plus my two optical drives would get kinda messy. However, I think I can live with that, if the performance is equal to or better than that of the raptors.
Out of curiosity, semi-unrelated, for someone like me who's main use for performance is in gaming (since other than that all I really do is programming and web surfing, which don't take much performance), what stripe size would you guys reccomend?
Thanks in advance for your help
-Col.Kiwi
I was thinking about a rather pricey but awesome setup -- dual WDC raptors in raid 0. A friend has this setup and its very fast.
However, tonight something else occurred to me. I currently have and use a single WD800JB. With the immense price of raptors, for about $50 (canadian $) less, I could buy two more WD800JBs <b>and</b> a Promise PCI IDE RAID card.
What I'm wondering is, what would perform better?
The $50 is an issue for me.. but I could afford the raptors just by waiting a little longer. However, if the 3xJB setup can match the raptors in performance, I might as well do that considering it costs less.
I suppose it would have an affect on performance that 2 of the 3 JB drives would be on the same channel (woo, I read the FAQ! ), since the card I can afford and would get has two channels.
Rediculous as it sounds to some of you -- storage space is not an issue. I use my system for gaming and programming as well as simple web tasks, and currently my 80gb drive is nowhere near full. The slightly smaller size of a 2x raptor array would present no problem, and the much larger size of the 3xJB array would just be unused for the time being.
Also a factor worth looking at is that SATA cables are so deliciously small and compact.. and enough IDE cables for those three JBs plus my two optical drives would get kinda messy. However, I think I can live with that, if the performance is equal to or better than that of the raptors.
Out of curiosity, semi-unrelated, for someone like me who's main use for performance is in gaming (since other than that all I really do is programming and web surfing, which don't take much performance), what stripe size would you guys reccomend?
Thanks in advance for your help
-Col.Kiwi