How would a 7200rpm raid0 compare to a single momentus xt hybrid drive?

Hi guys. I wonder how would a normal 7200rpm raid0 compare to a single momentus xt hybrid drive? Any idea guys? Thanks!

 

It would easily outperform it in 'brute force' type stuff like copying/moving large files around. It would also still be in 2nd place when more 'snap' is required of the file system.

A good HDD (like the XT) is much better than a 'normal' RAID0 of two 7200 RPM drives - almost every single time.

 

^ I dont think so.

Raid 0 of say two 500GB 7200rpm HDDs will smoke out one XT 500GB HDD almost anytime.

 

Anytime ? I would say you are lucky to see it beat XT 1% of the time.

 

My R3 would come with a stock 320gb. So Im planning to buy another 320gb to set it up as raid 0. Now I'm wondering if the xt would perform better than my 2x320gb raid 0?

 

Not an easily answered question. It in the end it counts on the programs installed and your usage pattern. Since there is no 100% way to tell this ahead of time you can only go by some very general rules of thumb.

If you are just a casual user, browsing the web, some office apps, a casual game or two, shutting down when done then the XT is your best bet. If you are a hardcore gamer with several games you play, never shut down, constantly run large DB's or VM's set up the RAID or better yet get a SSD with HDD secondary as an even better solution.

Remember with ICH based controlers that they are not REAL hardware controlers. They use the CPU cycles for the controlers grunt work. So not only is the SSD faster it lightens the CPU load in the background over a RAID 0 etc.............

 

Anytime the XT uses its cache it'll kill the RAID. For overall performance, you'll see better perfromance with RAID 0. I suggest the XT.

 

Raid0 uses hardly any resources at all, to the point where it's negligable.

However keep in mind that Raid 0 makes very little difference to small file read/writes and in fact it can be worse.

 

Counts on the stripe size, with 4KB on a ICH9m and x9100 I was seeing 150 MBs max transfer rate and 25% cpu usage when benchmarking. Again this is an extreme example just to see how bad it could get. The CPU is needed to code/decode to the stripe. 4KB forced the maximum and there by also capped transfer rate (a larger stripe would have provided well over 200 MBs).

If you stripe normally at 128KB this will all get lowered significantly. Also it is rare to stream data at full capacity lowering effect of CPU cycle loss even more. I am just stating it does use CPU cycles, not the amount. Overall it most real world situations it may be negligable but then again accoring to usage it may not be.

The larger stripes make it way worse as to use a 4KB file on a 128KB stripe it has to read/write a large file lowering IOPS. This si why the constant debate as to whether it is better to have a large or small stripe size. You could spend years reading all the thoughts out there on this subject alone.

Get a SSD and all that is irrelevant, unless you want to get insane and RAID 0 SSD's. Then you can complicate it with other issues like trim. This is not to say SSD do not have issues too, they do. The state of the art has improved though...................

Edit; I should note I did the 4KB stripe on 2 XT's. It was a test for best use of XT's NAND and extended internal cache. For the 1 day I had this setup it was amazingly fast for a HDD but still not as fast as a SSD for reads and access.

 

Raid 0 is still just as slow as a normal drive in random seek, the instant access time and random seek are what make SSD faster than a HDD not the raw speed (throughput)

I had Raid 0 for a long time and didnt notice almost any boost in speed for day to day things because day to day things load up tons of very small files all over the HDD, this is what a SSD excels at.

Raid 0 is for very large contiguous files like video editing work, its really about the only thing its good for.

Add in the trade out for using more power (2 drivers always in use) higher failure rate (2x higher) and the other issues you can run into and I have to say Raid 0 has long ago bit the dust and lost its place to all but the most dedicated video editors. Anybody else should be looking for a SSD if they want more speed, and the XT is a good hybrid between the two that works for most people not using a ton of large applications like games.

P.S. I am a video editor and ever since I moved to using H264 to encode even a single HDD is faster than my CPU can encode, I would get no speed boost even with Raid 0 based on how cpu intensive my new encoding methods are, but I still need the space a HDD offers till large capacity SSD are much cheaper.

 

Really fast is to setup a ramdrive and install app(s) to it. Blows everything else away...

 

Random seek tends to be a bit slower in raid 0 because both drives have to track to the correct position and its the slowest that will dictate the wait.

 

Thanks for the info's. Might be getting the momentus xt.

 

yup, just remember to count in the time that you have to reinstall the whole thing after each reboot(hopefully it is not from a DVD).

 

The momentus XT is a pretty good product. It will use a lot less power than two raid 0 7200rpm drives as well. If you've got the cash to burn, ssd + 7200rpm and call it a day.

 

I'm already interested!