RAID or 10,000RPM?

[musicmaker]

If I want to use a raid 5 setup, what is the difference between using fx. WD2500YS (Raid Edition) and WD2500KS (Not Raid Edition)?
Or maybe the Barracuda 7200.10?

What's special about the Raid Editions?

 

[samello]

After reading this I got more confused than I was before LOL

I'm also considering two options:

1 - 2 x WD 7.200 rpm 8mb buffer in RAID 0

2 - 1 x WD Raptor 10.000 rpm 16mb buffer single drive

For a GAMER, wich setup would increase performance?

 

[makrossv]

The only performance gain you get for Raid0 on games are faster loading and installing. I've never seen where it actually upped your FPS. I could be wrong...

Anyway, an ideal solution would be to raid 2 sata drives cause you can get them for less than 60$ each during sales to match or exceed raptors in throughput. I've got benchmarks to back that up (pm me if interested, can send u the jpg). I would recommend backing up your data in another more reliable drive. Raid0 is just crazy fast loading and installing. It definately helps to have the load times as you spend more time playing than waiting on installs and stage loading.

I have 2 sata 7200s raided0 and backed up to 1 ide drive weekly or biweekly. I can say that it's very satisfying.

 

[levicki]

What's special about the Raid Editions?

Aside from 5 year warranty for 24/7 workload those Raid Edition drives have tweaked firmware and Buffer to Disk speed of 70MB/sec (sustained).

Key features:

RAID-specific TLER (time limited error recovery) - Improves error handling coordination with RAID adapters and prevents drive fallout caused by extended drive error-recovery processes.

TLER explained:
Desktop drives are designed to protect and recover data, at times pausing for as much as a few minutes to make sure that data is recovered. Inside a RAID system, where the RAID controller handles error recovery, the drive needn't pause for extended periods to recover data. In fact, heroic error recovery attempts can cause a RAID system to drop a drive out of the array. WD RE2 is engineered to prevent hard drive error recovery fallout by limiting the drive's error recovery time. With error recovery factory set to seven seconds, the drive has time to attempt a recovery, allow the RAID controller to log the error, and still stay online.

Improved power controller - Consumes less power and generates low heat.

[code:1:0eac1355f4]
Power Dissipation
Read/Write 10.75 Watts
Idle 8.90 Watts
Standby 2.00 Watts
Sleep 2.00 Watts
[/code:1:0eac1355f4]

I can confirm this, drives are really cool.

Hot plug support - Allows swapping of hard drives without having to power down the system or reboot; promotes system design flexibility, data availability, and serviceability.

This is also important feature for RAID systems.

For a GAMER, wich setup would increase performance?

In your case definately 1x Raptor because of faster access time.

Loading games is not about the throughput -- games most often access many small files during level loading so the access time is more important and single Rapotor spinning at 10,000 RPM has 30% faster access time than any RAID setup you make with 7,200 RPM drives.

Anyone who doubts this is invited to use IOMeter to check Raptor .vs. RAID0 performance.

You can always add one large drive (or two smaller drives in RAID) later for secondary storage.

 

[McParty]

I have one final question....I hope!! LOL

On the Seagate Barracuda drives I see in the reviews (at least on new egg) that you need to "remove" the jumper in the back to enable Sata 3.0Gb/s. I just want to make sure here.... is that correct?? Remove...not "move" to another position??

Also.... In a raid 5 setup with sata drives... do you have to worry about slave and master?? If so, where and how?? LOL

OK...so it was one final questionssssss !! LOL

 

[pshrk]

I'm not sure about the jumper but SATA has no slave/master so you don't need to worry about that.

 

[robertbently]

1 - 2 x WD 7200.10 rpm 16mb buffer in RAID 0

2 - 1 x WD Raptor 10.000 rpm 16mb buffer single drive

For a GAMER, wich setup would increase performance?

These two options are driving me insane...

Things I understand:
- Raid 0 does not increase 'small file' random access performance, such as when a game engine tragically needs to go to HD for mid-fight info
- Raid 0 does increase 'large file' sequential access performance, such as sequential manipulation of large media files == video editing
- Operations that intuitively appear 'small' or 'large' file often are not, like level loading for games as levicki mentioned

In addition to high end gaming, I also have the unfortunate demands of a DAW setup to consider. Manipulating a single track of audio not in real-time is a 'large' file operation as the audio engine just loads the dang thing into RAM and is done with it. However when I am manipulating 12-16 audio tracks (each with multiple audio files associated to them) in real-time all information is streamed from the hard-drive, and it is very easy to crash the audio engine due to HD bandwidth limitations. Intuitively this would seem to be both a 'small' file and 'large' file operation simultaneously.

This leads me to my questions:

1) Does anyone know where real-time audio editing falls in the 'small' vs. 'large' file manipulation spectrum?
2) Does anyone who has experience with both raided 7200.10's and single 10k raptors have any further anecdotal evidence to provide on the subject like BuffaloFan did?

Sorry to ressurect this dying thread but my q's seemed appropriate here. Btw my system: 680i mobo, 8800gts, 2gig ddr800 c4 ram, E6300, set fsb to 400 and cas timing to 4 in bios.

 

[pshrk]

I can't answer your questions and I am not an expert on RAID but I can tell you a few things that may help.

1.
The first time you read or write a file the OS is going to place that information within a "cache" in memory. For any subsequent reads/writes your hard drive speed/setup should be inconsiquential as all reads/writes are done directly to/from memory. These files will be evicted from the memory cache when more memory is needed for other things. Perhaps adding more memory will solve your problems, however I would think 2G would be enough.

Note: when i say inconsiquential i am ignoring the memory bandwidth and the hard drive bandwidth for delayed write operations. Perhaps your problem is that you just don't have enough write bandwidth in which case the RAID 0 would be better ( I think someowne correct me if I'm wrong here)

2.
You may want to consider fragmentation as well. The fragmentation of a file at creation time is unknown, and you are completley at the mercy of your operating system. I would imagine that if you are doing alot of append operations the file would be very fragmented, and if the size of the file is constant throughout its lifetime then the file would be more likely to be sequential.

3.
Raid 0 increases read/write performance, however access time suffers slightly.