HDD Performance - NP9262

Can someone please give me an idea of the performance (ie speed) differences between the following HDD combinations:-

#1 - 2 x 5400rpm RAID 0
#2 - 1 x 7200rpm No RAID
#3 - 2 x 7200rpm RAID 0


I understand #3 should give the best performance, but I am interested to know how #1 & #2 compare.

Also how much of a performance boost is #3 over the better of #1 & #2 ?

 

#2 fast
#1 faster
#3 fastest

Raid 0 combines the two drives to make them run seemlessly so 2 5400rpm in raid 0 will be faster then 1 7200rpm with no raid.

 

Not that you asked, but Raid 5 Seagate SATAII 120's with E6850 CPU on the D901C

HD Tune numbers - Meg per second
Max: 108.0
Min: 51.2
Av: 82.3

 

he wanted raid 0 too.

 

this is correct.

also, the main benefit of raid 0 is that you can have multiple programs performing reads and writes at the same time without the performance penalty that you will find with one hard drive. you will not see a difference in raid 0 if the only thing that is happening is waiting for the next level to load while you are playing a game.

 

You are not entirely correct. RAID-0 increases your overall read times significantly, even if only 1 program is trying to read. This is achieved because the data is written alternately to each drive, so the single program reads data from both drives simultaneously. Load times are GREATLY reduced by using RAID-0, and it is very noticable.

 

Rennyn I think we are both right.

 

this is not correct for consumer-grade raid, like what is found in laptops. you will not see greatly improved loading times for just one program (unless you are doing video editing) like loading a level in the game environment.

there has been alot of tests done on raid 0 and they usually end up slamming it because they only perform one software test at a time and there is not a huge performance increase besides synthetic benchmarks. where the benefit of raid 0 comes from is that you can run multiple read/write intensive application without choking your system. for example, you can run 2 spyware programs and an anti-virus program doing full system scans at the same time, while surfing the internet and transfering large amounts of data from a card reader to a directory in the hard drive system. if you were to attempt doing these tasks on a single drive of the same size as the raid 0array, the system would crawl to a halt and beg for mercy.

so the bottom line is that you can multi-task much more effiecently with raid 0, but if you expect your games to load twice as fast you will be dissapointed.

here is a good article on a raid 0 test. i must admit, though, that the arguments on raid 0 never end

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2969&p=8

 

Found another article, by a Clevo resller, that is not a fan of RAID in non server environments:-

http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles.php?id=29


Equally, there are plenty of articles in support of RAID, eg

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/394
http://tweakers.net/reviews/515/1/raid-0-hype-or-blessing-pagina-1.html

 

RAID-0 is great for performance, but not so great for reliability.