Hard Disk Configuration
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Based solely on the spindle rate, the VelociRaptor.
'With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control,mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country! from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?' - Jay Leno
So, based solely on spindle rate, you'd choose 10,000 rpm over 14,400 rpm (2*7200 in RAID 0)?
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So, based solely on spindle rate, you'd choose 10,000 rpm over 14,400 rpm (2*7200 in RAID 0)?
Seek time would be better on the raptor. STR (serial transfer rate) will be better on the 2 x 7200 rpm drives. So in my opinion it really depends on how often you seek versus how often you load large multi MB files completly in memory. Today in most cases seek is more a factor than STR since most single drives have a pretty high STR. The $130 US seagate 1.5TB drive reads at 120MB/s provided it is sequential (1 seek). So in theory in 1 second + 14ms you can load a 120MB non fragmented file entirely into memory. I would say this is not a common task (unless you have an enormous amount of RAM) today so seek is more important.
John
modified on Monday, December 29, 2008 11:09 AM
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So, based solely on spindle rate, you'd choose 10,000 rpm over 14,400 rpm (2*7200 in RAID 0)?
Tests on my previous RAID 0+1 setup showed it's about 20% faster than a single drive. Not a huge boost and no better than the 14k drives I have now. Of course you could put a couple of 14k drives in a RAID 0 config. and get the perks of both. Cheers, Drew.
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So, based solely on spindle rate, you'd choose 10,000 rpm over 14,400 rpm (2*7200 in RAID 0)?
Yes, I am not a big fan of Raid 0. Now if you wanted to do Raid 1 with the 10K Raptor...
'With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control,mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country! from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?' - Jay Leno
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Tests on my previous RAID 0+1 setup showed it's about 20% faster than a single drive. Not a huge boost and no better than the 14k drives I have now. Of course you could put a couple of 14k drives in a RAID 0 config. and get the perks of both. Cheers, Drew.
Thanks for the info. Nice to get a reply from someone with experience rather than worthless opinions.
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Thanks for the info. Nice to get a reply from someone with experience rather than worthless opinions.
My reply came from extensive experience. At home and at work. I have setup 100s of hard drives and used many different levels of raid in the process.
John
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Thanks for the info. Nice to get a reply from someone with experience rather than worthless opinions.
My reply also came from extensive experience. I just didn't want to bore you with the details.
'With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control,mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country! from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?' - Jay Leno
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My reply also came from extensive experience. I just didn't want to bore you with the details.
'With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control,mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country! from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?' - Jay Leno
BS
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My reply came from extensive experience. At home and at work. I have setup 100s of hard drives and used many different levels of raid in the process.
John
Didn't mean to offend John, my reply was aimed at Tim's spindle speed response. By the way, what's STR? Is it Sustained Transfer Rate?
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Didn't mean to offend John, my reply was aimed at Tim's spindle speed response. By the way, what's STR? Is it Sustained Transfer Rate?
Serial Transfer rate. Basically the rate the drive will read from the disk provided it does not need to seek.
John
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Which would be fastest a WD VelociRaptor[^] or a pair of WD RE3[^] drives in Raid 0 configuration?
I was just researching similar the other day, from what I understand the "enterprise" type drives are optimized for servers, lot's of random reads all over. The Velociraptor is a workstation drive optimized for reading data from a long line of it by reading ahead etc. So for workstation use workstation drives are often faster. Due to this, even though I had an unlimited budget, I opted for two Velociraptors in raid 0 configuration and it's plenty fast. I was considering SAS but it's server optimized and reportedly not as fast for a workstation.
"It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it." -Sam Levenson
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BS
You asked for help. I offered it in a direct manner. I chose not to throw a bunch of information at you just a summary. Why the hostility?
'With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control,mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country! from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?' - Jay Leno
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You asked for help. I offered it in a direct manner. I chose not to throw a bunch of information at you just a summary. Why the hostility?
'With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control,mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country! from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?' - Jay Leno
I was looking for help from someone who had experience with the two configurations and your response implied you'd just looked at the numbers and guessed which one was best. If that's not the case then I apologize.
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Which would be fastest a WD VelociRaptor[^] or a pair of WD RE3[^] drives in Raid 0 configuration?
From a data security point of view, having 2 terabyte-sized drives in RAID-0 mode is a recipe for disaster. Get 2 of thoer VelociRaptors in mirrored mode. You get faster read speeds and better reliability. Believe it or not, I've tried a lot of different hard drives already, and failure is pretty common (random data loss for example).
So the creationist says: Everything must have a designer. God designed everything. I say: Why is God the only exception? Why not make the "designs" (like man) exceptions and make God a creation of man?
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I was looking for help from someone who had experience with the two configurations and your response implied you'd just looked at the numbers and guessed which one was best. If that's not the case then I apologize.
No apology needed, but thank you anyways. All drives attached share their respective buses for sustainable throughput. As a result, the more drives on your bus the more your sustainable throughput is shared. SATA in general still has the IDE technology internally within the drive and the old IDE standard internally had a sustainable throughput of only 33MB. Thus any gains in performance due to configurations are offset by the bottle neck of the architecture. In a Terminal server application environment this is real obvious if the server uses SATA. SAS or SCSI are very different because not only does the bus actually put the data through at the rates described, but the controller also does some premtive optimization. Yes I understand that the bus is still shared, however, the defined speeds of 320MB or 1.5GB or 3GB is actually a little more real. A SAS drive will transfer at 800MB where SATA still will be limited. There is more but suffice it to say that any drive at a higher spindle rate will out perform similar drives at lower speeds. Raid 1 is my preferred environment where the volume can be contained on a single drive because the read/write operations can be handled preemptively in a more efficient manner by the controller than a RAID 0. In the end it all depends on what you are trying to do, hence my simple answer of the 10K single drive or 10K RAID 1. Hope this helps.
'With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control,mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country! from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?' - Jay Leno
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No apology needed, but thank you anyways. All drives attached share their respective buses for sustainable throughput. As a result, the more drives on your bus the more your sustainable throughput is shared. SATA in general still has the IDE technology internally within the drive and the old IDE standard internally had a sustainable throughput of only 33MB. Thus any gains in performance due to configurations are offset by the bottle neck of the architecture. In a Terminal server application environment this is real obvious if the server uses SATA. SAS or SCSI are very different because not only does the bus actually put the data through at the rates described, but the controller also does some premtive optimization. Yes I understand that the bus is still shared, however, the defined speeds of 320MB or 1.5GB or 3GB is actually a little more real. A SAS drive will transfer at 800MB where SATA still will be limited. There is more but suffice it to say that any drive at a higher spindle rate will out perform similar drives at lower speeds. Raid 1 is my preferred environment where the volume can be contained on a single drive because the read/write operations can be handled preemptively in a more efficient manner by the controller than a RAID 0. In the end it all depends on what you are trying to do, hence my simple answer of the 10K single drive or 10K RAID 1. Hope this helps.
'With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control,mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country! from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?' - Jay Leno
Yes, that does help a lot, thankyou.
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Yes, that does help a lot, thankyou.
Your welcome.
'With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control,mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country! from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?' - Jay Leno