Which would be faster? Both have 500gig platters, but the 1TB has 32meg cache vs 16meg cache on the 500's. I will be running this on an Areca 1210 raid card. I am simply looking for the fastest performer.
Do you really need that much data in RAID0? Performance wise I would have said that 4 500 gig drives would beat the 2 1tb's if those 500gigs are 500 per platter. I wouldnt worry to much about the cache though.
Not sure though. Look for tests with both just with 2 drives in raid 0, if they are pretty close then i'd say 4 would be faster.
Like I said, I was just looking for the fastest setup. So you don't think the difference in cache sizes will make a difference in performance? If not, I already have 2 of the F3 500gig's in raid 0, I would just order two more, format and start over fresh with 4 of them in raid 0. Right now they have them at the Egg for 54 and free shipping...
Those are 333gig platter hd's. The newer F3's are faster, plus I already own 2 of the 500gig's. I think I will just get two more of them and go with the four.
Did you get the drives in??? Also if you put 4 of these in RAID0 did you short stroke them? I want to know the kind of performance your getting with 4 F3's in RAID0.
I noticed better performance and faster seek times when I short stroked my two at 220GB total and the rest in RAID1 for backups/snapshops.
250 MB/s average and seek time of about 9ms. Id expect/assume 4 of these in RAID0 might get 400 MB/s and if short stroked an access time of about 8.5ms. Maybe it only scales at 50MB/s after the 2nd? So maybe your getting 350-370?
That's wikid fast for mechanical!!! I might have to grab two more, only I'll probably end up short stroking a 300-400gig partition and RAID1 the remaining. I might be able to push 370+ with a lower seek time if that's your average rate across the entire drives. 342 was your average, what was your max close to the beginning of the drives?