Windows 7 HDD Spec

[runcmd]

The guy just likes his gadgets and this is just another one.

 

He already has a PC running SAS and has got exceptional performance from the drives already so decided this one should be SAS too. They rate at about £200 for one of these which is 15k rpm.

 

I must admit they are very quick these SAS drives. He tried 2 x SSD 2.5" drives in a laptop that was uber quick lol but the drives did cost like £500 each!

 

I hope this deputy heads obsession with expensive gadget is at his own expence and not the schools.

[RinSewand]

It's a personal build for him purchased privately.

 

I was just thinking the same thing runcmd - thankfully it's private!

[danrhodes]

I hope this deputy heads obsession with expensive gadget is at his own expence and not the schools.

 

Yeah it's all private with his own coin!

 

D

[flyinghaggis]

Can't help but feel that if you're gonna blow £400-500 on 2 x 300Gb SAS Harddrives you'd be better off just buying a 256MB SSD drive for the same amount of cash?

[Jamo]

Can't help but feel that if you're gonna blow £400-500 on 2 x 300Gb SAS Harddrives you'd be better off just buying a 256MB SSD drive for the same amount of cash?

 

Not sure about a 256MB drive, might be pwned by anything but Win3.1 lol

[flyinghaggis]

Not sure about a 256MB drive, might be pwned by anything but Win3.1 lol

 

Would load Windows 3.11 damn quick though

 

Yeah, might be worth going for the 256 GB option instead

[apeo]

Was just looking at the prices at SSDs and I see the price has gone down since last i looked (which was a while ago). Still expensive mind but I think i might get one myself.

[Jamo]

My brother bought one and the difference is insane, it really surprised me how much more responsive the whole OS felt when doing normal tasks.

 

He did buy a second and RAID0'ed them together but the performance dropped, was something to do with the nVidia chipset on the mobo if i remember always worth checking before buying

[apeo]

My brother bought one and the difference is insane, it really surprised me how much more responsive the whole OS felt when doing normal tasks.

 

He did buy a second and RAID0'ed them together but the performance dropped, was something to do with the nVidia chipset on the mobo if i remember always worth checking before buying

 

Yeah I intend to have it as the OS drive. Hmmm thanks for the caution, didnt even think the raid controller would cause it to slow down.

[Jamo]

I think it may have only affected this particular board as I know some people have had success with RAID0 with them. Still even one drive should be damn fast.

[danrhodes]

I can vouch for it being mind blowingly quick from the laptop experiment I did with 2 SSD drives in RAID 1. XP O/S loaded in seconds, was extremely responsive in what ever you did, it really removes any bottlenecks.

 

D

[pwds]

The logic re: RAID1 and faster read times as explained to me was that the controller could read different sectors off two drives simultaniously, thus increasing read speed.

 

I don't know if that was an inaccurate statement of fact by the individual concerned, I've always worked on the basis that RAID1 is slower for both read and write, I'm just curious for the bottom line on this.

[Jamo]

The logic re: RAID1 and faster read times as explained to me was that the controller could read different sectors off two drives simultaniously, thus increasing read speed.

 

I don't know if that was an inaccurate statement of fact by the individual concerned, I've always worked on the basis that RAID1 is slower for both read and write, I'm just curious for the bottom line on this.

 

From the ever reliable Wikipedia

 

Mirrored set without parity or striping. Provides fault tolerance from disk errors and failure of all but one of the drives. Increased read performance occurs when using a multi-threaded operating system that supports split seeks, as well as a very small performance reduction when writing. Array continues to operate so long as at least one drive is functioning. Using RAID 1 with a separate controller for each disk is sometimes called duplexing.

[Arthur]

The logic re: RAID1 and faster read times as explained to me was that the controller could read different sectors off two drives simultaneously, thus increasing read speed.

This feature depends on the controller used. Not all of them support streaming reads. Even when they do the performance improvement isn't that great particular for normal desktop workloads.

[Arthur]

Raid 0 is faster but depends how important that data stored on this machine, is stick to what you got, what is the spec of the rest of the machine?

Only by about 2-3%. Given that you double your chances of drive failure with RAID 0 it's just not worth the risk IMO. An SSD would be a much better upgrade.

 

Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth. (Source).