HD ignorant

dstyle347

but thats ok cause ignorance has a cure..

Drive choice... speed vs. value...
2x80gb 7200rpm striped @ $90 vs. 1 74gb 10k rpm @ $160

Is there any comparison? I don't what to do... I want speed but not .0002/ms for $70.. I just want to know it's worth it.

Kwitko

Although most everyone seems to be a striped array fanboy, primesuspect has convinced me otherwise. They tend to be quite unstable. If you value your data, I'd go with a single drive with a large cache and native command queuing (if your mobo supports it, of course). Either that or go striped and be sure to back up often.

Mt_Goat

The only piece of the pie a striped set offers is higher "sustained transfer rate". and that only applies to files large enough to take advantage of it. Another piece of the pie is "seek time". A striped array is often slower at this than a single drive in real life and this is actually more important for a system since your operating system and applicatons are constantly seeking files to run things. Another slice of the pie is "RELIABILITY". This is paramount to everything else because it makes no sense at all to have everything on a system that is much more volitile than the reliabulity of a single drive. Instead of just worrying about one drive going bad you really need to worry about every single component in a RAID-0 array going wrong. You have 2 drives, 2 cables and a controller to worry about. I once lost a striped set because I accidenly bumped an IDE cable while cleaning my system with it turned off! I only made out as I had everything backed up on a separate drive. There is much more to it but this is the short version.

TheSmJ

I've had striped arrays go out on me as well (twice, a few months apart) and it's not fun to deal with unless you make a backup at least two times a week (and least). I bought a single, fast SATA2 drive which is twice as large as my old array and never looked back.

Plus I've read a few articles about how striped arrays are known to make no difference in performance when loading games/OSes, and are more prone to failure (as MTG said above).

Kwitko

Excellent points, mtgoat.

Arrays in general introduce more things that could go wrong, but doing so without redundancy makes it that much worse. As for performance, while my RAID 1 arrays take a slight write performance hit, their read performance is on par with Ultra160 SCSI drives.

RWB

Yeah I am not too much into RAID either, been there. done that.

Thrax

I remember when everyone was striping their drives, and I was like the only person with an NF7-S who wouldn't do it, and everyone lol'd at me. SCREW YOU GUYS.