Fast Hard Drive Advice Please
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What's the best solution for fast hard disk access in a home PC? From what I've read it looks like multiple drives in RAID 0 configuration would be best.
AxisFirst For Business
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What's the best solution for fast hard disk access in a home PC? From what I've read it looks like multiple drives in RAID 0 configuration would be best.
AxisFirst For Business
Personally I'm not sure there's much benefit for RAID 0 in a home PC. You only get any benefit from striping if you have multiple concurrent disk accesses which target different disks, which tends to be the case if you have random access I/Os. The vast majority of I/Os in most systems are sequential - we've all written the code, open a file, read it to the end into memory data structures, close the file. When finished editing, open the file for writing, spew out the data structures again, close the file. All sequential. With sequential I/Os, each drive in a striped array (RAID 0 or 5) effectively becomes active in sequence as the file pointer moves across the disks. Only if you have a lot of concurrent I/Os to different files might you get a benefit, but even then you don't get a lot of advantage. RAID 0 has the obvious greater risk that if you lose one of the disks, you lose the volume. The probabilities are greater that you'll lose at least one of the disks than if you were to lose a single standalone disk. Compensating for this by using RAID 5 has a large disadvantage in write speeds. The best place to start is to get disks with high spindle speeds. The higher spindle speed increases maximum bandwidth from the platter, and slightly decreases access times as the desired block will appear under the head more quickly, on average. At the very least get 7200rpm drives, 10,000rpm SATA drives are also available for a premium and generally have lower capacity than 7200rpm drives. (750GB 7200rpm drives are available for about the same price as 150GB 10k rpm drives). Because of the varied access patterns for different applications and the different loads to which systems are put, it's really difficult to tune the disk subsystem to any degree for a home PC. You might get most benefit from simply throwing lots of memory at the system, so that more data is cached.
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