Current fastest setup for a desktop?

B

bubbles

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 16, 2005
Messages
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It's been a while since a built a new computer. What's the defacto HDD setup for a decent system these days?

I see the Seagate 7200.10 16mb cache are rated well, along with the WD Raptors.

Is RAID-0 worth it?

I usually have a smaller, faster O/S driver and a bigger storage drive and an external firewire backup drive. In my experience the slowest part of a computer is usually the HDD, especially when you have a poorly setup swap file.
 
I just upgraded to two Raptors in RAID0 and can say it is faster than my old Seagate 7200.10 RAID0.

Was it worth the money I spent? Yes and no. For the speed, hell yes but for the storage not so much. You need to decide what is more important to you.

Many people here swear by RAID0 and some hate it so you might get a lot of different opinions.
 
Current fastest setup
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Still multiple iRAMs in RAID-0. However, since it is almost impossible to find a current gen boar with four PCI slots, I would say a bunch of SSDs in RAID-0, say six of them or more.
 
bubbles said:
I see the Seagate 7200.10 16mb cache are rated well, along with the WD Raptors.

Is RAID-0 worth it?
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you'll get descent speeds with two or more of those seagates, the raptors would be better (esp if you're after small seek times rather than bandwidth) but they cost a small fortune. Go raid... its good... its also now on basically every motherboard, so it's cheap.. much cheaper than getting a high-end hdd... or god-forbid an uber-expensive SSD drive!!! (still I would love one of these http://www.fusionio.com/index.html but thats just getting silly)
:D
 
I moved to two Raptors in RAID0 (from a single 750G 7200.10) on my last system refresh and while with normal computing tasks it didn't seem to make much difference, loading games and working in PS definitely "feel" more snappy, though I haven't done any really comparisons so it could just be placebo... :)
 
Single SCSI. Too expensive? Single Raptor then.

Raid 0 has its place, but not for most instances.
 
protias said:
Single SCSI. Too expensive? Single Raptor then.

Raid 0 has its place, but not for most instances.
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are you sure??:confused:

because when I upgraded my old pc's hdd from a regular 7200rpm drive to a 10krpm WD Raptor, I didn't really notice the difference in performance/load times and that kinda bugged me seeing as I could've got a 320gb drive for the same price as the 34gb raptor etc.. but when I decided I needed more room for my OS/installs and scrapped the Raptor for two 200gb hdds I had laying about, I definitely noticed the difference and that annoyed me double (i know i should be happy about that but it still bugged me)....

now that old pc has it's raptor back... because well what the heck else am I going to do with a 34gb drive? paperweight?

I reckon raid-0 is the bees knees..... plus byte for budget it runs circles around raptors
 
gaspah said:
are you sure??:confused:

because when I upgraded my old pc's hdd from a regular 7200rpm drive to a 10krpm WD Raptor, I didn't really notice the difference in performance/load times and that kinda bugged me seeing as I could've got a 320gb drive for the same price as the 34gb raptor etc.. but when I decided I needed more room for my OS/installs and scrapped the Raptor for two 200gb hdds I had laying about, I definitely noticed the difference and that annoyed me double (i know i should be happy about that but it still bugged me)....

now that old pc has it's raptor back... because well what the heck else am I going to do with a 34gb drive? paperweight?

I reckon raid-0 is the bees knees.....
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When I moved from my old system (from a Socket A) to my current rig with an IDE to my Raptor 150 (and AMD S393 X2), I noticed the difference. The Raptor is much snappier than my IDE was. Let me guess, you had a first gen 36BG Raptor right? Those are pretty much crap but the newer ones are much better. ;)

I haven't run any tests with Raid 0 because for me it is not worth it. Several members have done the tests and have seen little, if any benefit, and in some cases, Raid 0 was actually slower.
 
Raptors if you want fast "seek" times, segate perps for faster large files transfers.
 
protias said:
Let me guess, you had a first gen 36BG Raptor right?
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not sure about raptor gens but it was a SATA1 drive (150mb/s) that I got 3 or more years ago... i think.. it's just after intel p4 prescot chips come out and sata was quite young in desktops mobos...

protias said:
When I moved from my old system (from a Socket A) to my current rig with an IDE to my Raptor 150 (and AMD S393 X2), I noticed the difference. The Raptor is much snappier than my IDE was. Let me guess, you had a first gen 36BG Raptor right? Those are pretty much crap but the newer ones are much better. ;)
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so that was a Full System Upgrade? not just a hdd upgrade? I don't think you can't really compare two different machines? of course a X2 is going to be more snappier

socket 393 lol
 
gaspah said:
not sure about raptor gens but it was a SATA1 drive (150mb/s) that I got 3 or more years ago... i think.. it's just after intel p4 prescot chips come out and sata was quite young in desktops mobos...

so that was a Full System Upgrade? not just a hdd upgrade? I don't think you can't really compare two different machines? of course a X2 is going to be more snappier

socket 393 lol
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Sounds like you had the first gen Raptor. The 36GB were pretty much garbage. The newer ones are much better. In addition, I don't think the motherboard you had had the greatest SATA controller either.

Yes, a 393, not like those 939s. Mine was all custom. :p In all seriousness, I do see much faster response on the drive alone. I have a 80GB IDE as my main drive on a AM2 3600 x2 and it is much slower than my Raptor 150. I have a 120GB on a Socket A system, and I notice how much slower it is than the Raptor. I have a few storage systems, so I know what the feel is like for a drive.
 
fastest setup would be a SAS card and the 72G 15k rpm 2.5 inch drives. You could use this as an option for under $1000. New 2.5 inch SAS drives are fast as hell.
 
Rocco123 said:
fastest setup would be a SAS card and the 72G 15k rpm 2.5 inch drives. You could use this as an option for under $1000. New 2.5 inch SAS drives are fast as hell.
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SCSI drives, designed for server use, are generally slower than fast SATA drives designed for home use when used on a personal computer.

RAID 0 is not worth it.

Get a single Raptor for your OS and a big 7200 RPM drive for your stuff.
 
kumquat said:
SCSI drives, designed for server use, are generally slower than fast SATA drives designed for home use when used on a personal computer.

RAID 0 is not worth it.

Get a single Raptor for your OS and a big 7200 RPM drive for your stuff.
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Why isnt the RAID 0 worth it? Im running it now and im seeing a drastic improvement over my last build.
 
serialtoon said:
Why isnt the RAID 0 worth it? Im running it now and im seeing a drastic improvement over my last build.
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The improvement probably has very little to do with the RAID.

RAID 0 is not worth it because the increase in performance is basically negligible, and you pay for it big time in terms of data integrity. You greatly multiply your chances of experiencing a catastrophic failure that results in the loss of all your data with each drive you add.
 
kumquat said:
SCSI drives, designed for server use, are generally slower than fast SATA drives designed for home use when used on a personal computer.
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How do you figure when the reads and writes are so much faster. Plus seek time is faster than the Raptor.
 
protias said:
How do you figure when the reads and writes are so much faster. Plus seek time is faster than the Raptor.
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It's the drive firmware.

SCSI drives designed for server use are optimized for random access across the entire disk. By comparison, consumer drives are optimized for what amounts to largely sequential reading and writing.

SCSI drives tend to perform relatively poorly in desktop applications when compared to fast ATA/SATA drives.

I'm trying to find the article I read a couple years ago at StorageReview. They did a pretty comprehensive comparison. They concluded that desktop users, even power users, conform much more closely to the usage for which consumer drives are optimized, and general desktop performance on SCSI drives is lower than fast ATA drives.
 
kumquat said:
It's the drive firmware.

SCSI drives designed for server use are optimized for random access across the entire disk. By comparison, consumer drives are optimized for what amounts to largely sequential reading and writing.

SCSI drives tend to perform relatively poorly in desktop applications when compared to fast ATA/SATA drives.

I'm trying to find the article I read a couple years ago at StorageReview. They did a pretty comprehensive comparison. They concluded that desktop users, even power users, conform much more closely to the usage for which consumer drives are optimized, and general desktop performance on SCSI drives is lower than fast ATA drives.
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I would like to read that article because I know SCSI drives are much faster than ATA and SATA.
 
The way i see it is, i have one RAID 0 for Windows, then a separate normal 500GB drive for my music,movies,pictures etc etc...if you setup is like mine, then who cares if one drive fails. Id rather have the performance than worry about the drive failing. Now, if you run a server with a bunch of important files...i would NEVER run in RAID 0. Seems like rudimentary common sense to me.
 
serialtoon said:
The way i see it is, i have one RAID 0 for Windows, then a separate normal 500GB drive for my music,movies,pictures etc etc...if you setup is like mine, then who cares if one drive fails.
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Because it's a big pain in the butt.

Every drive you add seriously increases the probability that your computer will hose itself one day. When it does die, you will have to wait days for a replacement, go through the entire recovery process, reinstall drivers and applications. That's a big pain in the ass.

I've gone through enough of those to try to *minimize* the chances of it happening, not double or triple it.

The performance benefit is *so* low it's not worth it. I highly recommend against RAID 0 for "speed."
 
kumquat said:
Because it's a big pain in the butt.

Every drive you add seriously increases the probability that your computer will hose itself one day. When it does die, you will have to wait days for a replacement, go through the entire recovery process, reinstall drivers and applications. That's a big pain in the ass.

I've gone through enough of those to try to *minimize* the chances of it happening, not double or triple it.

The performance benefit is *so* low it's not worth it. I highly recommend against RAID 0 for "speed."
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So because its not worth it to you cause you *hate* doing a windows install (painless imo) then RAID 0 is no good? I dont know, it doesnt bother me one bit, and the performance is not negligible...its a nice boost in speed. I use photoshop alot so to me, i love the boost.
 
serialtoon said:
So because its not worth it to you cause you *hate* doing a windows install (painless imo) then RAID 0 is no good? I dont know, it doesnt bother me one bit, and the performance is not negligible...its a nice boost in speed. I use photoshop alot so to me, i love the boost.
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I said "it's not worth it."

I didn't say "RAID 0 is worthless."

Big difference.

Let me quote myself because something is unclear:

"RAID 0 is not worth it because the increase in performance is basically negligible, and you pay for it big time in terms of data integrity. You greatly multiply your chances of experiencing a catastrophic failure that results in the loss of all your data with each drive you add."

"The performance benefit is *so* low it's not worth it. I highly recommend against RAID 0 for "speed."
 
Raptors are slow. I run 10 15k scis drives in a raid array. That is good for games also.
 
crewzen said:
Raptors are slow. I run 10 15k scis drives in a raid array. That is good for games also.
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So, how much did that set you back?

What's the RAID arrangement? 10 drives in RAID 0? That's a lot of bling for someone trying to choose whether to buy an 8800GTS or not.
 
kumquat said:
I can't find it, but have a look at this:
http://www.storagereview.com/Testbed4Compare.sr

The Raptors smoke 15K RPM Ultra320 and SAS drives in desktop performance benchmarks but get eaten alive in multi-user file server applications.
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In your current post, you have how they test things. How they test things is not the same as results. I wouldn't say the Raptor really smoked the SCSI drives.

I'm not terribly familiar with how much is a big margin considering benchmarks, but I from what I saw, the SCSI drives were (majority of the time), faster than the Raptors. What would be considered a "large margin" as I honestly don't know?
 
protias said:
In your current post, you have how they test things. How they test things is not the same as results. I wouldn't say the Raptor really smoked the SCSI drives.

I'm not terribly familiar with how much is a big margin considering benchmarks, but I from what I saw, the SCSI drives were (majority of the time), faster than the Raptors. What would be considered a "large margin" as I honestly don't know?
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Click the "sort" button at the top.

For the office benchmark, the 150GB Raptor is about 5% faster than the fastest 15,000 RPM SAS drive in the benchmark and 16% faster than the fastest 15,000 RPM Ultra320 drive.

For the "high end" benchmark, the 150GB Raptor is 11% faster than the fastest 15,000 RPM Ultra320 drive and 18% faster than the 15,000 RPM SAS drive. That's right - the 150GB Raptor is almost 20% faster at "high end" desktop use than a 147GB 15,000 RPM SAS drive.

I posted that link in response to the person that said that they "know" that SAS drives are "much faster than" SATA drives.

The point is that it depends on the drive and the function. 15K SAS drives aren't faster than Raptors on everything - and it's because of the firmware.

SCSI drives are optimized for multiple simultaneous users. SATA drives are optimized for single users.
 
You posted the results of two out of the 4 tests that the Raptors won. The other 20 things SAS drives beat the piss out of it, including Far Cry and WoW tests. I/O tests, access times, and read/write rates were all won by SAS/SCSI. That tells me that overall, SCSI is faster. That is not "beating the piss" out of SCSI. And when you're running a RAID 0+1 or something similar, forget about it. SAS wins hand down. When they start releasing the 146 15K 2.5inch disks and the 300GB 10k 2.5inch disks, drive performance will be further increased.

Costs? Heck yes, SAS and SCSI cost wayyyy more. But for an enthusiast that is looking to drop $1k+ on a disk subsystem, it's not totally beyond their reach.
 
Rocco123 said:
You posted the results of two out of the 4 tests that the Raptors won. The other 20 things SAS drives beat the piss out of it, including Far Cry and WoW tests. I/O tests, access times, and read/write rates were all won by SAS/SCSI. That tells me that overall, SCSI is faster. That is not "beating the piss" out of SCSI. And when you're running a RAID 0+1 or something similar, forget about it. SAS wins hand down. When they start releasing the 146 15K 2.5inch disks and the 300GB 10k 2.5inch disks, drive performance will be further increased.

Costs? Heck yes, SAS and SCSI cost wayyyy more. But for an enthusiast that is looking to drop $1k+ on a disk subsystem, it's not totally beyond their reach.
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You quoted "beating the piss" but that's not something I said.

I used the two real-world desktop benchmarks. The I/O tests are literally there to simulate a multi-user file server environment. The SCSI drives are made for that and are supposed to beat the pants off the SATA drives - and they do. The other benchmarks are totally synthetic besides the game benchmarks, and the game benchmarks really only deal with fractions of a second worth of load times.

Look, the message to take home is that even the fastest, most expensive SCSI drives are often *slower* than a SATA drive when utilized in a desktop environment. Being a super-whiz-bang 20,000 RPM SCSI drive with a bus that can transfer at 1000 GB/s can often perform more poorly than a nice fast SATA drive in a desktop.


Let's compare the 150GB Raptor to the Maxtor Atlas 15K II 147GB SAS drive and the Fujitsu MAU 147GB Ultra320 drive.

The Raptor convincingly wins 3 of the 5 single-user benchmarks and benchmark suites. It beats the Maxtor SAS drive in all five.

Both SCSI drives totally trounce the Raptor in the multi-user file server benchmarks and the meaningless synthetic benchmarks.
 
:D:D You guys noticed that the OP has never returned?
For a normal cashed strapped ( OMG it's 50 cents !!!!!! AND I don't get my allowance 'till next week) user, a Raptor for OS and programs with a decent 300-500GB drive for storage, is as good as it gets. I would love to RAID 0 a coupla of those 15K RPM drives for my OS, just to "see". I've eyeballed a few set-ups, but I've always been "1 beer away". :D
 
I said "general desktop" use, not specialized CAD workstation, server or anything like that.

I use my second, bigger drive mostly for downloads, temp files and lots of winrar operations so big file copies is what I am interested in speeding up.

It seems like a good set up would be:

WD Raptor (C: O/S drive).
2x Seagate 7200.10 RAID-0 (D: drive for downloads and temp files).
External USB for backup of O/S drive.
 
bubbles said:
I said "general desktop" use, not specialized CAD workstation, server or anything like that.

I use my second, bigger drive mostly for downloads, temp files and lots of winrar operations so big file copies is what I am interested in speeding up.

It seems like a good set up would be:

WD Raptor (C: O/S drive).
2x Seagate 7200.10 RAID-0 (D: drive for downloads and temp files).
External USB for backup of O/S drive.
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If you RAID 0 that storage drive, perform backups daily because you just doubled the chances that you will lose all of your data in a drive failure.

That's a good setup, though.
 
kumquat said:
I think it's more like "Mr. Full of Crap" ;)
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Hey you don't know, he could be running 15k U320 drives that are 9Gb in size that can be had pretty cheaply these days. I have a few sitting in my garage. :) If he really is running that number of drives, I hope he's running a RAID5 (50) array in an external dedicated SCSI box with hot swapping back plane.
 
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