Re: Small 7200rpm Sata drives for Raid 0?

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Will wrote:
I want to run my OS and programs on a Raid 0 volume (2 or more drives - probably 4 if they're cheap enough). I'm attracted to the idea of using small, older Sata 7200rpm drives for this. Yet I don't see anybody doing this. These are single platter (apparently more reliable than multi platter designs), have the same rpm speed as new drives but their performance may be lacking in the cache and read/write parameters. Is this an unwise move? Small Sata drives go for less than $20 each. $80 for a 4 banger Raid 0 setup seems attractive. Otherwise I'm looking at several hundred dollars.

So describe a typical scenario where this is a big win. Is your drive
LED constantly lit, such that fixing the storage system is a must ?

Maybe if I was copying a 4GB file, from one partition on the RAID 0,
to another partition on the RAID 0, it would be a good thing. But if
I was doing backups, I'd be doing backups to an external drive, with its
more conventional transfer rate limits. Similarly, transfers over the
network, would be limited by my Ethernet cable.

Maybe it would help with Photoshop, and saving out a file, or transferring
something to Photoshop scratch. So if you're a Photoshop user, yes,
a cheap RAID 0 would be worth a few bucks. If you worked on posters
or banners (very large files), it would probably be a must-have.

But for a lot of other day to day activities, the RAID 0 buys nothing.
The reason is, performance is dominated by seek time, rather than
transfer rate. Many things you do, are hindered by head movement on
the drive.

A SATA SSD may have a seek time of 0.1 millisecond, so can solve the
head movement problem, but SSD drives still have a lot of other compromises.
Good ones, are not cheap. And cheap ones are not good (stuttering on early
Jmicron controllers). The cheap ones don't even make good paperweights.

(An example of overkill... Up to four SSDs inside the main housing,
RAID0, 256MB RAM cache. $3,368.99 with free shipping.)

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz_z_drive_p84_pci_express_ssd

http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-OCZSSDPCIE-1ZDRV1T-Z-Drive-PCI-Express/dp/B00284ABEQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1252516990&sr=1-1

Since the SATA hard drives are so cheap, you can try out your idea and soon
have an answer for yourself. Some people swear by their RAID 0 setup
("my game load time is shorter"), but I wouldn't touch one with a
barge pole. Make sure you're doing daily backups, to minimize the
loss when one drive mechanism fails. RAID 0 has no redundancy.

I also find, that the average RAID user, doesn't know how to operate
or do maintenance on whatever kind of RAID they've set up. And in
some cases, they "push the wrong button" at the first sign of a
problem. Or fail to push any buttons (i.e. the users who don't know
how to check RAID status, until it is too late and the data is gone).
If you're a motivated person, and can spend the time to learn, then
the RAID concept may still be of some value.

Paul
.

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