Hard Drive Question

The Funky Llama · #1 10-30-2007, 12:57 AM

How much faster are the RAID 10,000 rpm drives than the standard 7200 rpm ones (seagate, etc.)? Is it worth paying the extra money and sacrificing hard drive space?

I will be mainly using it for poker, surfing the net, and watching porn.

Bremen · #2 10-30-2007, 02:06 AM

I personally feel 10k rpm drives are not worth it however I seem to be in the minority (personally I think its a placebo effect but I don't care enough to test my theory, its your money after all).

RAID refers to arrays of multiple drives. They can offer speed benefits as well as redundancy.

Hoopster81 · #3 10-30-2007, 02:48 AM

I just built a machine and have 2 10k drives in RAID 0

it flies - no more lag on FTP or other sites that were lagging, HUD stats pop up immediately, etc. I think it's worth it especially if you have big databases.

pokergrader · #4 10-30-2007, 04:12 AM

[ QUOTE ]
I just built a machine and have 2 10k drives in RAID 0

it flies - no more lag on FTP or other sites that were lagging, HUD stats pop up immediately, etc. I think it's worth it especially if you have big databases.

[/ QUOTE ]

And don't care about your data...

I wouldn't recommend RAID 0 for general usage. And believe me, if FTP was lagging, it wasn't due to hard drive throughput.

The general idea behind 10k drives is to reduce latency, which can make windows slightly faster when you are opening programs for the first time or otherwise loading large data from the hard drive. While it is minor, there is a definite speed advantage here. I don't know what the cost difference is, but if it is minor you might as well spring for the 10k. If the difference is large, I would just go with the standard 7.2k drives.

RAID is a whole different can of worms. It is a way to combine multiple hard drives together to form 1 simulated hard drive with some sort of advantage. RAID 0 gives you a disk throughput advantage (although not latency), but doubles the risk of data loss. RAID 1 gives you double protection of your data but throws away 1/2 your available disk space.

I would just stick to normal 7.2k drives without RAID. It is going to complicate your life pretty much needlessly. If you want to increase performance on something like a database, pay attention to the amount of cache on each hard drive (or get more RAM for your system).

Hoopster81 · #5 10-30-2007, 04:55 AM

it's just a poker machine

only valuable data on it are my pt databases that I back up abyways

pokergrader · #6 10-30-2007, 05:44 AM

[ QUOTE ]
it's just a poker machine

only valuable data on it are my pt databases that I back up abyways

[/ QUOTE ]

Well RAID 0 certainly has applications, and if you are very strict about making backups it isn't so bad. However I still don't recommend it for general usage.

I also think if you benchmarked your RAID 0 database against one running on a single drive you wouldn't be blown away by the difference, but I guess a lot of this depends on the database size and usage.

SamIAm · #7 10-30-2007, 09:12 AM

My personal experience: RAID0 seemed super fast, and I definitely noticed an increase in speed of PokerTracker imports, although I didn't do any hard tests.

Then one of my harddrives failed, and I had to reinstall the entire machine. I lost my poker data, but that was just poker data.

Take that for what it's worth. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Beavis68 · #8 10-30-2007, 12:04 PM

[ QUOTE ]
How much faster are the RAID 10,000 rpm drives than the standard 7200 rpm ones (seagate, etc.)? Is it worth paying the extra money and sacrificing hard drive space?

I will be mainly using it for poker, surfing the net, and watching porn.

[/ QUOTE ]

RAID is not a type of drive, RAID is a type of hard drive control.

There are two typical methods of setting up RAID, RAID 0 and RAID 1, RAID 0 splits the data between two or more drives and eliminates or reduces the lag time of the read/write head moving to a new location to read data. This is known as striping.

RAID 1 is know are "mirrored" and creates a second image of the first drive on the second for protection against HDD failure. There is also RAID 10 or 0+1 which combines the two but requires 4 HDDs.

There is a RAID 5 which adds a parity bit check and requires 3 HDDs.

I have heard that a 7,200 RAID 0 system performs as well a 10,000 RPM standard setup, but I havent seen any benchmarks.

nuclear500 · #9 10-30-2007, 12:21 PM

[ QUOTE ]

I will be mainly using it for ... watching porn.

[/ QUOTE ]

Such honesty.

The Funky Llama · #10 10-30-2007, 12:54 PM

Thanks for the advice guys. Right now I am thinking about getting two drives:

1) 160GB - WD Raptor 10000RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache . This will be my main drive.

2) 1TB - Hitachi 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 32MB Cache. This will be my secondary drive - where I store mostly music, video, and poker database backups.

What do you guys think of this setup? The 10,000rpm drive should be faster even though the other drive has 32MB cache, right?