WD RE4 drives in RAID 0

[swimswithtrout]

I' m not ready to bite on or pay the extra $$$ for a SSD yet, so I've been contemplating a pair of WD RE4 250Gb drives in RAID 0 to get a little better speed for my OS/applications drive.

The 500Gb array would cost ~$140, expensive for 500 Gb of spinning disks, but the speed seems very worth it, nearly maxing out SATA 2 speeds with 265/67 Mb/sec being reported for the 500 Gb version in Raid 0

Reviews for the smaller 250/500 drives are few to none compared to the 1-2 Tb versions, so I was wondering if anyone here has tried them out ?

 

[rozar]

Remember that while throughput is great with RAID 0 access times are not and this will kill your preformance on an OS volume. I would not do a RAID 0 for an OS. The SSD drive will be MUCH MUCH faster for an OS than spinning platters in RAID 0.

 

[swimswithtrout]

Thanks !

I'll just wait 'till SSD prices come down, probably 6 months or less is my guess.

As a side note, I remember buying one of the first 256 MB CF cards for my old Nikon 990 3 .3 Mp digicam "a while ago" for ~$ 175.

Technology changes in an instant.

 

[bullsandbears]

I had 3 WD RE4 250GB in raid 0 (for my secondary drive), then tried raid 5, then one of the drives died and I RMA'd via WD website (BTW, they shipped the replacement drive out b4 I even sent the broken drive back) and they shipped me a 1TB RE4 The seek time for the 1TB is slightly longer than the 250GB. (you wouldn't notice the difference). I'm using them as storage and file sharing. And I have to disagree with Rozar. If done correctly, you may have a very fast boot up Raid 0 system. My last rig was built on 4 WD Raptor 360 (I chose the smallest size drives for the least amount of seek time) on windows XP and it booted up just as fast as my Vertex 3 Max in Windows 7 x64. I gamed on those for at least 4 years daily and 3 of those are still running. Another way you may consider is getting 2 Seagate Momentus XT in raid 0. I know a lot of people say that those drives are not made for raid, but that's only because the original firmware was crap. I bought one for my wife's laptop(Asus G1S)with & upgraded to 4 gigs of ram and Windows 7 x64 boots up in about 45 secs (not counting bios screens). When Vertex 3 or Agility 3 120GB come down a dollar/GB, I'll replace her Momentus XT and buy another one to set it in raid. BTW, the RE4s are so quiet that I turned off all the fans and I swear I cannot hear them. Happy researching & shopping