SATA 3 and SATA 6 in Raid 0 on Raid Card with Sata II

[mrchaos101_04]

Please Help.

I have the following situation.

I have a 3 drive WD Raptor 300GB in RAID 0 for speed. I am using an areca ARC-1210 PCI-Express x8 SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card. One of the drives failed. I removed the drive and rebuilt the raid Raid on 2 drives. I could tell the difference between 2 and 3 drives.

All 3 of the WD drives are SATA III. The card seems to be SATA II.

I called WD and complained. They sent me an RMA. While at work i thought 4 drives in RAID 0 must be even faster so I looked at the Model number on the WD RMA email and ordered a 4th drive.

I got the RMA and the new drive today. Guess what. The RMA and new drive are SATA 6. So now i have a delima. I have 2 SATA III drives AND 2 SATA 6 drives.

My raid card appears to be SATA II.

I am looking for performance. I want speed. Can all 4 of these drives live in raid 0 ok? will the faster ones drop down? Should I buy2 more SATA 6 drives? Should I look for a new raid card? I was told this card was very good and much better the then on board cards for ASUS Rampage III mobo and the MSI Eclipse SLI mobo. SO I dished out $300 for it.

I am looking for FAST boot times. FAST decompression of very large files and FAS compression of very large files. I do a lot of video rendering as well.

 

[mrchaos101_04]

Anybody?

 

[k1114]

Sata 6 is not out, the newest version is sata 3. The hdds are sata 3 (6Gb/s) the same as your other hdds so will work in raid 0 together.

 

[mrchaos101_04]

Ok then WD tech didnt know what he was talking about. Here are the drive info:

Old Drives are Model :WD3000HLFS
New Drives are Model: WD3000HLHX

SO I can mix SATA 3 and SATA 6 in raid 0 and be ok?
With the Card Being SATA II, would it be worth changing the card or any of the drives out?

Can you tell a difference in 4 drives raid 0 vs 3? Im worried about bottle neck.

 

[k1114]

Again, they are not sata 6, they are sata 3 (6Gb/s), it says "sata 6.0GB/s" in the specs and on the box. All 4 of your drives are sata 3. The only difference is the new drives are the newer version with more cache as they don't make the old version anymore. And you can raid hdds with different amounts of cache.

Since the raid controller is sata 2, all drives will work at sata 2 speeds (3Gb/s each) so you are nowhere near the max. Sata 2 or 3 does not matter on a mechanical hdd as they can't fully saturate sata 2.

If speed is an issue, ssds would have been better if less space is not an issue.

 

[mrchaos101_04]

Sorry meant Mix SATA II and SATA 3 on that line.

Do you think replacing the Raid Card with an Intel RAID SATA 8 internal port w/ 256MB cache memory PCI-E 2.0 x8 Controller Card (RT3WB080)

And put all 4 drives on it would be better performance vs 4 drives on a SATA 2 controller?

I dunno if I can afford a SATA 3 card AND 3-4 SSDs

Sounds to me.... seems the cache is about the only diff here... maybe worth exchanging the RAID card out?

Un less you think there would not be much notice in speed. Then Ill just keep this set up with the 2 with extra cache.

Also. How do you feel about 4 drives on raid 0 vs 3? I know this increase chance of data loss...but I have a 3TB drive for back up.


OH and THANK YOU SOOOO Much for spending your time in here and looking over my issues! I do appreciate it!!

 

[k1114]

Changing the raid card won't make a difference as I said before sata 2 or 3 doesn't matter. You'll get about as much performance difference from 2 hdds to 3 vs 3 to 4.

 

[mrchaos101_04]

K1114..... thanks again.

I see what you are saying now. Kinda took some research on another thread and your thread combined for me to understand this.


RECAP of what i have learned....

SATA 1 = 1.5Gb/s
SATA 2 = 3Gb/s
SATA 3 = 6Gb/s

SATA 3 = SATA 6 when it comes to naming conventions there is confusion as 3 refers to the version and the 6 refers to the transfer rate. (this was my issue with WD tech on the phone)

My Drives are all 4 SATA III... 2 have more cache then the others. But that should not be an issue and all 4 are compatible to go into a RAID 0 environment.

SSD seem to not be to swift on anything below SATA 3.
Mechanical drives on/using SATA III are for marketing only, because max speed what mechanical drives can achieve is about 150MB/s. (info from another web site??)

SO.... Keeping my hardware as is may be best... though I'm still grey on the 3 drive vs 4 drive situation. Reason I say this ( did read your post) is because I could personally see a difference in large file extraction when i dropped to 2 drives from 3. I could tell a difference in performance and extraction time.

Going with what you say K1114, if 2 drives in raid 0 is max on speed for WD Raptor 10RPM drives.... then perhaps Raid 0+1 would be in order here....seems i have 4 of these drives....redundancy.

BUT

I have also learned....and I am still clarifying, that 1 single SSD SATA III will be a "hella" lot faster then my raid 0 Drive set up....

Perhaps I should do as suggested and buy a single SSD in SATA III and connect it to the SATA III header on my mobo for system drive.....

BUT this now begs the question.... Ho much faster is SSD SATA III 2x drives in RAID 0 compared to 1?
A guy at work said that there is no change and it is not worth it.

 

[mrchaos101_04]

I was kind of looking at this drive here....

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227714

But im not going to buy it until you reply. You have been a lot of help.

 

[thently]

Wow ok just something to look into there are SSD drives (Single no raid involved) That can do 500MB a sec and will destroy your 4 disk setup. I know this as i had a 5 disk raid 0 and i liked it but replaced with just a sata 2 ssd and it destroyed my raid speeds boot time cut in half literally 15 seconds. Office 2010 word and excel open in 1 second outlook in 3 seconds just insane. less power less noise winner all around.

T

 

[k1114]

I've never heard someone call it sata 6 unless they didn't know what they were talking about. I've heard sata 6gigabits which is fine imo but not sata 6, that implies version 6, which it is not.

Reviews of your velocs say it averages 90mb/s and bursts around 150mb/s and in theory each additional hdd should raise that amount so 4x90=360mb/s (600mb/s bursts) But this isn't a perfect world so will be less than that.

The main benefit of a ssd is access times, which is about .15ms vs the velocs 7ms. The advertised speeds of ssds are for when it's new. After you use it for awhile it'll be just a bit lower. But it should still be able to match or beat raid 0, and with the much lower access times it'll be much quicker.

I would suggest the adata s511 120gb instead as it costs $100 less and is about identical to the vertex 3. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211551