Fastest NON SSD hard drive? willing to use RAID 0

[tightplay123]

Fastest NON SSD hard drive? willing to use RAID 0

looking for the fastest NON ssd hard drive for an i7 920 build, will use RAID 0

thanks!!

 

[sminlal]

Most people buy SSDs for their very fast access time. RAID doesn't do much, if anything to reduce access times - so using RAID isn't going to get you any of the access time improvements that an SSD would.

The hard drives with the fastest access times are those with the highest spin rates - for example a 10KRPM Velociraptor or at 15KRPM SAS drive.

 

[Guest]

I assume you are going for read and write speeds that hopefully won't degrade over time. Many of the newer 7200rpm drives are just as fast as the Raptors and and cost considerably less as well and are much larger.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-hard-drive-charts/h2benchw-3.12-Avg-Read-Throughput,1010.html

Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD502HJ,500 GB,7200rpm,16 MB Cache Averaged 110 mbps and seems to be a great drive so far.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152181

The drive has great reviews and being 500gb for only $55 you could easily run a pair in raid0 with another drive for backup storage if cost is a factor in your decision. If you have some more info relating to your question please update us, thanks.

 

[sminlal]

Just to be clear:

Fast access times are best at improving the speed of booting and starting programs. This is what SSDs are really, really good at, and what RAID arrays don't really help with.

Fast transfer rates are best when reading or writing very large files, such as when doing video editing or Photoshopping large RAW images from digital cameras.

Shuffman is talking about transfer rates.

 

[randomizer]

Fastest in what way?

 

[tightplay123]

i guess im looking for super fast access maybe?

loading hands into a poker database is generally what im looking for......and being able to retrieve data quickly while playing

 

[Guest]

I agree with Siminlal about what SSDs are best at. It really depends on what the poker game consists of. If its loading larger, say 25mb continuous files it'll be relatively quick on a normal drive. If its loading a whole bunch of smaller files scattered around the drive then the SSD would definitely be the better option. How come you want a drive thats not a SSD? Also you need to consider the write speed on SSDs are slower and they do begin to slow down after rewriting data to them.

 

[Pointertovoid]

A normally written database engine doesn't read the whole base, but only the required items instead, and then only access time matters, which speaks strongly for Ssd and strongly against Raid.

To the F3, you can add the 7200.12 and the 7k1000c and a few more. Choose disk capacity multiple of 250GB.

But for fast access time AND mechanical disk (which isn't the current choice!) go to 15,000 or 10,000rpm.

 

[Pelvic_Thrust]

Fastest NON SSD hard drive? willing to use RAID 0

looking for the fastest NON ssd hard drive for an i7 920 build, will use RAID 0

thanks!!

The fastest SATA III HDD is Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS. Even if you connect it to SATA II port it will be 50% faster than any other non SSD HDD.

 

[sub mesa]

10k and 15k disks are losing their usability. They were meant to provide limited amounts of storage which performed very fast. SSDs do that, but only one hundred times better.

Either you care about sequential transfer speeds; and go with many 5400rpm disks paired to get something like 400MB/s+ transfers with 4 disks. That may speed up some sequential access - but im guessing the OP wants to use his RAID array for the system drive. While RAID0 can also accelerate small reads and writes; it can never reach the performance level of an SSD which has very fast access times.

For a system drive, one SSD equals 100 HDDs in terms of performance.
For a data drive, an SSD may only be twice as fast as a normal HDD.

Meaning: don't use anything other than SSD for the system drive if possible. And no reason to use SSD's as data drives.

 

[seroism]

So I have a question regarding this. I want to have a fast startup and uploads when I start my computer but I also want my games to load faster during play as well. (cut scenes, switching zones, etc.) If I understand this correctly, I should get a SSD to do the 1st part and a regular HD for gaming part?

Another question, would it be better to get a 10k rpm or 15k rpm HD or would a 7200rpm be more than enough for the gameplay?


Sorry if I sound like I don't know what I'm talking about, it's because I really don't

 

[smash_74]

@tightplay123. I play poker all day and have been looking at upgrading my PC in the next month. I multi table Stars 12+ tables with Holdem Manager and Table Ninja and other bits in the back ground. I've been looking for info. on this topic for some time now and I have decided to just go with 2 7200rpm drives in raid-0, purely because I think this would be the best value for money/ performance for me. I've read that a bloke with ssd drive was importing hands to HEM at 30h/s and also read that another bloke with 2 brand new 7200 500gb in raid-0 was doing the same at 30h/s. This was my main issue with my current dinosaur and I would be happy with 30h/s. Not sure if you have seen this but it is well worth you checking out. Here it tells you how to get the best performance out of your data base etc and talks about different hard drive set ups. Hope this helps.
http://forums.holdemmanager.com/manager-general/11194-top-10-hem-performance-increase-tips.html

 

[Guest]

This sounds like a perfect candidate for a RAMdisk. Might as well use the Memory you already have and with free software it will be faster than any hard drive you could purchase because of the limitations of the interface on HDDs.

You would have to load the database into memory before starting to play each time, but that doesn't really matter and is as simple as copying a folder over to the RAMdisk.

There is free software that will create the RAMdisk for you. Gavotte's RRamdisk.sys is probably the easiest to use.

Article can be found here. There is a download link to RRamdisk.sys actually as well at the bottom of the article.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/

 

[muznich]

Those of you who keep saying RAID doesn't increase seek time are just wrong, it depends on the type of RAID. In RAID 0, your worst case scenario seek time is halved with two drives. You have two physical drives searching for something simultaneously, whoever finds it first wins. I agree that best case scenario isn't improved but the same goes for SSD best case scenario...

 

[WyomingKnott]

Those of you who keep saying RAID doesn't increase seek time are just wrong, it depends on the type of RAID. In RAID 0, your worst case scenario seek time is halved with two drives. You have two physical drives searching for something simultaneously, whoever finds it first wins. I agree that best case scenario isn't improved but the same goes for SSD best case scenario...

RAID0 stripes the data across two drives, so you have to read large files from both drives to get the complete file. This adds the seek times, not distributes them.

RAID1 might give you some of the advantage that you are discussing, since the same data is written in full to both drives and can be read from either one.

 

[neoreo12000]

WyomingKnot, you are partly correct. RAID0 does stripe the data across two or more drives. This however does not add the seek times together. Both drives access the data at the same time so the seek times are the same as a single drive. Twice data is transfered as compared to one drive. 2 drives configured as RAID0 is faster than a single drive.

RAID1 is mirroring only. It provides redundency in case of a drive failure. It will not increase or decrease seek or access time.

 

[LoganS]

to sum everything up. Get a SSD drive if you can afford it. if you have 2 regular sata drives you can use them in raid 0 configuration if your not concerned with complete a total file loss should one HD crap out. I understand there is a lot more to the different data transfer speeds of each HD type and configuration and if your doing some serious photo shop or gaming or something then I wouldn't be overly concerned about it. I guess I just don't see how a HD will help in a poker game is all, as long as its is a decent drive. If you have windows 7 go into your control panel -> system -> and check out your Windows Experience Index. it will rate your CPU speed and RAM and HD and which ever one is lowest on the score I would recommend upgrading first. you could have a super fast HD but have a crap CPU that has very little Cache. I find that most people over look cache but its a very important piece of the speed puzzle

these are just some ideas, I don't know what level of user you are, you may know all this already.

 

[RetiredChief]

My recommendation - Get an SSD. If the data base is less than 8 gigs and you have 16 gigs of ram, you could go for a ram disk. when you power on it will come up with ramdrive and database in ramdrive - Slows Boot time. Ram disk about 10 x faster than a SSD, SSD about 20> 50 Times faster than a HDD.
Ram Drive of Choice (free up to a 4 gig Ramdisk), >4 gig need to pay $19 (went up was 15): http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

On raid 0
.. Biggest benifit is in sequencial performance Which is the LEAST important parameter for a OS + Program drive. Great for Reading LARGE file structures ie vedio encoding or doing a lot of photo editing with 10 Meg jpeg/bitmaps.
.. Does Nothing for access time and Very Little for small 4 K random performance.
1) Reason for NO improvement in random 4 K is primarilly the strip size which is normally 64k or 128 K - each file is ONLY on one drive, not split - Hense NO performance gian.
2) Access time is a function of the indivdual drive, NOT how it is connected.

There is a way to improve access time using raid 0 - You Short Stroke the drive. ie a Pair of 1 TB drives and you create a Raid0 array ONLY using 20 -> 30 Percent of the drive And LEAVE the remaing disk space as UNUSED. This improves performance under Raid0 as All the data is limited to the Outer 20 -> 30 % of the platter where angular Velocity is Highest.

 

[ignoramus]

There is a way to improve access time using raid 0 - You Short Stroke the drive. ie a Pair of 1 TB drives and you create a Raid0 array ONLY using 20 -> 30 Percent of the drive And LEAVE the remaing disk space as UNUSED. This improves performance under Raid0 as All the data is limited to the Outer 20 -> 30 % of the platter where angular Velocity is Highest.[/quotemsg]

The main advantage of limiting the data to the outer part of the platter is that the distance that the read head has to move is minimised. This will reduce effects due to the read head seek time, but will have zero effect on delays caused by platter rotation.

 

[ignoramus]

i guess im looking for super fast access maybe?

loading hands into a poker database is generally what im looking for......and being able to retrieve data quickly while playing

Assuming that the total database size is relatively small, and that you are more concerned with disc access times than with stream rate, you will probably do better to segregate your time-critical data into a root directory that contains nothing else and that has a HDD to itself.
If you are using a pair of discs, a split-read implementation of RAID1 will give a greater enhancement to read performance than would Raid0. However, this will depend on your RAID controller.
An alternative that enhances both write and read performance is to split your data between two disc-directories as above. I haven't investigated public domain software for this, however.

 

[RetiredChief]

Old post, so image OP has his solution, but for others.

Overall performance is really both, head translation is reduced, which improves Average seek time, But also the rate (speed) at which the data is read. Say that you have a 4 K file ( 1 cluster/ 8 sectors) Have No Idea but just say that it takes a inch on the Outer edge, then this same data would take a larger distance. This means to read the same data the head would have to travel a greater distance.

Has to do with 2πR. say at 1 inch (center then Distance is 6.28 In, but at 3 inch distance the circumference is now 18.84 inchs (or 3 times the data). Rpms is fixed so one revolution the head will only read x data, but at Outer edge it will still take the same time but 3 times the data is read in that one revolution.