Storage Solutions 2xWD velociraptor 74/80GB in RAID 0 ?

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buBleZ

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Hi guys I am planning to go for a RAID 0 setup with 2xWD velociraptor drives of capacity 74GB/80GB. This setup is intended for dual boot OSes and few primary games.

Need feedbacks on this setup as to any advantages/disadvantages you guys know. Also can anyone tell me where I can buy velociraptor 74/80GB drives in India. I am in Bangalore and when i inquired in the market only 150GB were available.

thanks
 
If your raid array gets corrupted then I guess its goodbye to your data :lol: not common but still... You may not have important data on it but you could lose your saved games

other than this if you are ok with the risks go ahead

If you cant get the 74 gig velociraptor try going with a 150 gig one. even alone the performance is neat
 
bottle said:
If your raid array gets corrupted then I guess its goodbye to your data :lol: not common but still... You may not have important data on it but you could lose your saved games

other than this if you are ok with the risks go ahead

If you cant get the 74 gig velociraptor try going with a 150 gig one. even alone the performance is neat
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hm yeah agreed. There is a greater risk of losing data. I am planning to keep my documents, save games folder in another drive. OS, programs and games in raid drives.

I will also be having 1HDD with win 7 installed as a storage drive. In case there is a data corruption I will use the storage drive as OS drive to use the PC temporarily.
 
Velociraptors in RAID 0 > 7200.12 in RAID 0 > Velociraptor

Safest is using a single Velociraptor, but if you are sure about being careful with sorting data you are good to go.
 
I meant the V'raptors would blow the 7200.12 out of the equation when it comes to access times and not just theoretical read/write speeds reported by HD-tach! :P
 
I think the risk of data loss from RAID0 is over rated. If I have the money and inclination/ tech know-how to RAID 2 velos, I'd surely have my data on back up drives. Even if I didn't, single HDDs do fail too. Theoretically, chances of failure are doubled but that's the law of averages at work. Average as in, the middle of two extremes. I, for one, can live with that.

For the record, I might be running two Raptors in RAID0, but I sure don't have the money for 2 Velos :P ! Now, if my Raptors died on me...:)
 
I think its a good idea but it depends on your application really. I just vaguely know that if you work with photochop or 3d stuff you would need to load large files photo's etc.

The WD blacks have great read times but where the raptors really kick ass is random seek. That means it will find small files etc much faster. They have avg seek times from 5.5-7.5 ms where as most other drives are around 12-13 and really good ones 10-11 ish.

Newegg.com - Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD 74GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives

With extreme hardware like this it wont make sense from a value point of view but if you want something then you wont sleep till you get your hands on it.

Whats the rest of your config ?
 
^^ my rest of the config in my sig...

Based on inputs from other hardware forums as well I am planning to go for 7200.12 in RAID0 temporarily as the SSDs price should come down in 2010 when I can go for 2 SSDs in RAID0 :D
 
Zloyd said:
yep a single ssd or 2 in raid would be just MAD lemme know how raid zero works out on the 7200.12.
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sure. I have just ordered 2x500G 7200.12 drives from eBay. Applied a gift coupon for 1.3K worth planatronics bluetooth headset. Waiting for both. :)
 
OT @bublez: have you researched how to do dualboot with raid0 setup? are you going to get a dedicated hardware raid card rather than using onboard? which OSes do you plan to dualboot? Windows+Linux? If so, got any links on how to do this properly... Im interested in trying it out too...
 
vishalrao said:
OT @bublez: have you researched how to do dualboot with raid0 setup? are you going to get a dedicated hardware raid card rather than using onboard? which OSes do you plan to dualboot? Windows+Linux? If so, got any links on how to do this properly... Im interested in trying it out too...
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dualboot is just like a dual boot in a non-raid scenario. Just create partitions on your RAID array and install the second OS. I have this currently but I am trying to find the optimal way to partition for the best performance.
 
vishalrao said:
so the RAID is transparent to the OSes? meaning are you using hardware RAID card?
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Nope I am just using the chipset RAID controller. The OSes are not transparent to RAID. The intel bios raid software manages RAID and the OS needs a driver to work.
 
In real world tests the Velociraptors are only a few MBPS faster than the 7200.12 1TB drives. Loading times for Windows/Games are only faster by 1 or 2 seconds.

The only advantage is the Access Time which is half that of other drives. You're paying more for a marginally faster 300GB drive than for a 1TB drive.

And about that RAID0, yesterday I had 2 drives in my RAID5 array fail at the same time, so don't count on your data being safe for very long.
 
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