Raid 0 x4?

[hardwarenewb210]

Would running 4 WD 150 gig 10,000 rpm Raptor's in 0 raid Config be a waste? I guess if you do the math roughly its about equivalent to having 1 600GB 40,000 RPM Super Hard Drive with a 600mbps max transfer rate and a seek time of 1.2 milliseconds.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

Would running 4 WD 150 gig 10,000 rpm Raptor's in 0 raid Config be a waste?

Well, that depends on what you're doing. If you're doing DVD authoring, video editing, or need to edit 1GB graphics files in Photoshop, then no, a 4-drive RAID-0 is worthwhile.

If you surf the web and do some e-mail, then Yes, the 4-drive RAID-0 is a waste.

I guess if you do the math roughly its about equivalent to having 1 600GB 40,000 RPM Super Hard Drive with a 600mbps max transfer rate and a seek time of 1.2 milliseconds.

No, not at all.

You get 600GB, true. The access times do not decrease by a factor of 4. In fact, with a RAID controller that has no on-board cache, the access times to the array are slower than they are to a single drive. With RAID controllers that have a lot of on-board cache, the access time to the array can be somewhat faster than the access time to a single drive, but usually not by much.

 

[TeraMedia]

The whole point of the raptor is fast access time and fast read/write rate.

RAIDing raptors reduces the benefits of the fast access time because the controller is always waiting on the drive that takes the longest to access the data.

There are 7200 rpm drives out there that can approach (and sometimes beat?) Raptor sequential R/W speeds. There are SSDs out there that can do that plus crush on I/O rates.

SomeJoe is right. It depends entirely on what you intend to do with it. If you are doing largely non-sequential reads (ruling out large perpendicular drives) on large quantities of temporary data (ruling out SSDs, if the data is really large), you need as much R/W throughput as possible, and you cannot afford high-speed SSDs, then raptors in RAID 0 make sense.