Seagate Hybrid Drives in RAID ?

[drednoxx]

Good Afternoon

I am going to be upgrading my comp pretty soon and I am looking for some feedback/advice regarding Hard Drives.

Specifically the Seagate Hybrid drives, as the prices of SSDs are still too steep per GB to be useful to me as are 10k RPM drives, these have come into my attention as a good mix of reliability, price and performance.

I am thinking about getting 2 of them and using them in a RAID config, but I have never done a RAID before so have some questions.

1. How much actual space do drives on RAID give ? For example, If I put 2x 1TB drives on a RAID, am I going to end up with 2 TB of usable space or 1 TB of usable space ?

2. Has anyone here used the Segate Hybrid drives in a RAID ? I would appreciate the feedback on any performance gains or problems arising from them being hybrid instead of regular drives.


Thank You

 

[oxford373]

there are tow ways of RAID, RAID 0and RAID1 are for tow HDDs,
with RAID 0 you will end up with 2TB and its faster,there is no performance gain from RAID 1.
here is every thing you need to know about RAID
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
but tow 1 TB HDDs will cost you 200$ ,you can buy a 2 TB HDD for backup and one 64GB SSD bootup drive for the same price of tow 1TB HDDs,which your PC will be much more faster than 2x1TB HDD on RAID 0 mode.

 

[oxford373]

but if you want something cheaper than RAID and SSD ,
if you have 6gb or more ram you can disable page file,the gain of disabling page file is 15% faster and here is how to do it http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-performance-tweak,2911-4.html
and here is how much faster exactly if you disabled page file
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-memory-upgrade,2778-7.html

 

[RetiredChief]

The best option is 1 128 gig Cucial m4, or Samsung 830, coupled with a Samsung 1 TB F3. Cost: M4 and 830 SSD often are on sale for around $120 and The F3 HDD can be had at Newegg for $80 - Just have to catch the Sales. NOTE two Seagate Hybred drives are around $300.

On Raid0:
Raid0 Only really Improves large file Sequencial Read/Writes. Does NOT improve access time, and Only improves 4 K random read/writes by a small amount. For this reason Raid0 does very litel for OS Load and program load times. What it does improve is Working with Large Data structures. How effective the cache is when raid0 two Seagate Hybred drives - Sorry can't answer, Not sure how the cache would handle say caching half of a file.

Ref oxford373 comment on page file.
Disabling Page file will have very little impact on performance. The Only time it comes into play is if windows is accessing it often - And That is only when you are short on ram in which case it could have a negative performance effect.

While I do NOT disable my Page file (have 8 gigs in two systems and 16 gigs in one system), I do manage the page file by setting the Min and max to the same value. I use 1024 mb Vs what windows would set it to - about 12 gigs for 8 gigs of ram and as high as 20 gigs for my 16 gig system. Main reason I do Not disable is that there are a few programs that balk when the Page file is set to 0. And I found absolutely no performance change between setting to zero vs setting min/max to 1024 mbs.

 

[Brenderick]

Chief: A hybrid drive doesnt concern itself with file systems with regard to what it caches- Nor does it pay attention to, or even care about, a partition. What a hybrid drive does is watch individual block access requests, and then grade each block according to how often it is accessed. On a typical 1tb hybrid you have an 8gb flash cache; the drive merely moves the most accessed 8gb of blocks to the cache, dynamically. What's going on here is much, much lower level than a file system- it's happening within the firmware, behind what is, for all practical purposes, a logical drive that the computer sees.

Dred: So far as RAID and hybrid drives- While I have never tried it, I suspect that you would get some performance gains that would not be insignificant. Probably, under any really heavy load, such a storage system would revert back to the speed of striped mechanical drives rather quickly. Typical use type things that you do habitually- booting the computer, opening a browser to see your email, etc it would probably feel a lot like an SSD. I do agree with a previous post- you are better off buying a single, small SSD for a system disk and a large, slow spinner for user files- this will produce the best end user experience for the money. Essentially, this puts you in control of what data screams into the motherboard, and what crawls- because honestly, drive performance above a certain point is wasted just playing an mp3 file, for example, so music should go on the mechanical drives. Anything that is software or code of any sort will greatly benefit from an SSD- under almost all circumstances a consumer faces, all streaming data- a music file, a video file, pictures, etc- content and media- would be perfectly happy on a large spinning disk.

Hope this clears up some things-

 

[Liam Kelly]

I have 1 raid array using 3 500gb sshd's. I am lucky if it stays up for a week. Usually one drive will drop within a few days. Waiting for my replacement drives to come in. I strongly advise against using sshd's in a raid environment.