Raptor or RAID for best Performance?

SomeOldBloke

I'm trying to decide whether to have a Raptor HD for my OS and Apps and a 640Gb Caviar for data or just got with 2x640Gb in RAID 0, the OS will probably be Vista Ultimate 64bit.  Anyone with experience of both that can give me some advice?

Tyres100

Having a dedicated fast HDD for system is always faster then raid. Make sure to google it, your answers lie there. Grab a 36 GB raptor for your system drive or if you can afford it a SSD drive around 10 to 15GB in size for the system drive.

Shadow786

Im running Dual Harddrives (Samsung 1tb 7200) at Stripe Raid (0). Raided in Software (Windows Vista 64) and a SSD (OCZ 64GB). However i havent messed around, switching OS installations on the two drives, as for some reason it takes 10 minutes for vista to load in dos when doing a fresh install. Anyway i would definatly recommend OS on SSD/Raptor and games/multimedia on the raided or 7200 harddrive. You just have to make sure to Defrag regularly to get the best.

xxthecorexx

i gave up on raids. personally i didn't feel the performance was worth the headache of trying to get the system going again after a failure or a rebuild, ESPECIALLY for storage unless they're mirrored. right now i'm using 2 raptors and dual booting xp and vista64, one OS on each of the drives. if you're looking for a larger faster drive, maybe a velociraptor is what you want for an OS/app drive and the caviar as a data/storage/swap drive.

Rayx0r

Ive run RAID/0 configs for about 10 years now in my personal systems.  Started out with SCSI and the past year I switched to SATA II.

with that said, this may be my last RAID/0 config until they start making on board RAID controllers more reliable.  My old SCSI controller worked flawlessly.  Now that Im using SATA, the on board RAID from both intel and nvidia are very tempermental. 

On the nvidia side, I would frequently have data corruption on reboot for whatever reason.  It was very frequent which forced me to keep the PC running as much as possible.  Many times I would have to do a complete "windows repair" of the system.  So, recently I switched to intel.  With intel, I have my RAID set up as my primary boot drive with nothing else available in the BIOS.  However, if I happen to have a CD in my drive or a USB drive hooked up.. on reboot it always tries to boot off those drives and ignores my RAID.

Not to mention every time you load windows XP you need RAID drivers on a floppy to complete the install which in itself can turn into a headache.

With the right selection of hard drives, RAID/0 performs excellent.  However, SATA HD technology keeps getting better and better.   Currently your better off shelling out extra cash for a Raptor or VelociRaptor than put up with troubled windows installs and flakey on board RAID controllers.

SomeOldBloke

Yeah, I think I'll go with the 10,000 rpm drive for the OS and a 7,200 rpm for data.  RAID sounds like too much of a pita.

Thanks all for your input.

Darkholme

Originally posted by mbd1968


Yeah, I think I'll go with the 10,000 rpm drive for the OS and a 7,200 rpm for data.  RAID sounds like too much of a pita.
Thanks all for your input.

That's the direction that I am going, after thinking long and hard about it. Going with a Velociraptor for the OS/main drive and a 1TB 7200 drive for general storage. From what I've been told the performance boost you *might* get from a RAID setup isn't worth the headaches. DOOEEET!