If your mainly planning on using the disc for scratch disk i photoshop i would go with the raid.
But i would never put any valuable data on a stripe set without an backup option connected.. If one drive dies, everything is lost, common knowledge.
The advantages in the Raptor disks are mainly the low seek time, meaning if your system has to access alot of different small files you have an advantage, I do not believe there's a an advantage over a stripeset in speed really, im guessing they will be pretty close together.
To sum up:
If you have a backup solution of some sort for you valuable data, then go with the stripeset(raid0), if you do not, buy the raptor.
Odds are that one of those two disks are going to explode way before the Raptor ever will.
if you data is important back it up or ghost it regardless of the drive configuration. For the average home user including gamer, raid is overrated and hyped. You get bascially the same if not better performance and more stability (ie., less chances for raid-type errors) with a raptor. If raptor performance is not that critical, then go with the newer larger capacity seagate perpendicular drives. Now I don't know how intensive your photoshop editing is, so you could actually benefit from raid 0 correctly setup with backup. raid = risky array of independent drives. Just read this section and see the raid problems/issues/questions ...yes, most are user caused, but the fact remains that inexperienced users hose more raid arrays for different reasons compared to single drive setups. And then hose them completely trying to recover from errors. If you know what you're doing then go for it, but you must decide what you want, not someone else telling you. If you really don't need raid or fully understand it and how to setup,recover, etc then stick with single drives imo.
Here is my .02 on the matter. If I do RAID on the desktop its RAID1 period, for the simple benefit of being able to survive a single drive failure but you must realize that a virus or spyware infection is just as damaging to RAID1 as a single drive.
RAID0 should only be used in certain situations (in my opinion) by professionals using video editing software.
I prefer to use a single drive for boot, program installs etc, and I mount a second drive to be 'My Documents'. Since this is two drives I feel I get better overall performance this way but I have no proof other than 'feel'.
I actually have a third drive for storage and temp mounted in a folder for pvr use and down loaded files but nothing critical and an external drive for backup that I turn off when its not in the process of backing up my data.
This way I have saves, music, pictures, data files on one drive, temp, storage and swap on another, boot and programs on its own and a backup, so when I do anything the drives are being hit in various order depending on what I am doing so it 'feels' more efficient than a single drive system or a RAID1 system.
I do use the two of the new 160GB raptors and a 500GB SATA for the storage volume.
Most Dells can hold three drives, some only two and some four.
Just food for thought.
Message Edited by tphillips63 on 09-16-2006 12:45 PM
I agree with tphillips63. RAID-0 only gives perf increases for long sequential reads/writes, it is not designed for lots of random seeks.
Here is a wikipedia quote on the matter:
"RAID cannot provide a performance boost in all applications. This statement is especially true with typical desktop application users and gamers. Most desktop applications and games place performance emphasis on the buffer strategy and seek performance of the disk(s). Increasing raw sustained transfer rate shows little gains for desktop users and gamers, as most files that they access are typically very small anyway. Disk striping using RAID-0 increases linear transfer performance, not buffer and seek performance. As a result, disk striping using RAID-0 shows little to no performance gain in most desktop applications and games, although there are exceptions. For desktop users and gamers with high performance as a goal, it is better to buy a faster, bigger, and more expensive single disk than it is to run two slower/smaller drives in RAID-0. Even running the latest, greatest, and biggest drives in RAID-0 is unlikely to boost performance more than 10%, and performance may drop in some access patterns, particularly games."
If he is doing photoshop professionally there is an advantage in using a raid0 system over single drive, but merely for scratch disk(a photoshop term).
As long as you dont have a backup solution i would never recommend a Raid0 over two single drives, simply because the odds of failure is that much greater.
Ofcause i still believe the Raptor is the best option, but from a price/performance point of view it makes sense to buy the two drives instead.
Seek times on one drive can get clustered alot, compared to spreading out applications on two drives.
Best seen on a simple test like copying large files from one place to another on the same drive, compared to the speed it can be done from drive to drive. Seek times are really hurt from having the head move back and forth a zillion times.
Christian Hanse
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xcator
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tphillips63
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September 16th, 2006 16:00
RAID0 should only be used in certain situations (in my opinion) by professionals using video editing software.
I prefer to use a single drive for boot, program installs etc, and I mount a second drive to be 'My Documents'. Since this is two drives I feel I get better overall performance this way but I have no proof other than 'feel'.
I actually have a third drive for storage and temp mounted in a folder for pvr use and down loaded files but nothing critical and an external drive for backup that I turn off when its not in the process of backing up my data.
This way I have saves, music, pictures, data files on one drive, temp, storage and swap on another, boot and programs on its own and a backup, so when I do anything the drives are being hit in various order depending on what I am doing so it 'feels' more efficient than a single drive system or a RAID1 system.
I do use the two of the new 160GB raptors and a 500GB SATA for the storage volume.
Most Dells can hold three drives, some only two and some four.
Just food for thought.
Message Edited by tphillips63 on 09-16-2006 12:45 PM
dwlovell
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Christian Hanse
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If he is doing photoshop professionally there is an advantage in using a raid0 system over single drive, but merely for scratch disk(a photoshop term).
As long as you dont have a backup solution i would never recommend a Raid0 over two single drives, simply because the odds of failure is that much greater.
Ofcause i still believe the Raptor is the best option, but from a price/performance point of view it makes sense to buy the two drives instead.
Seek times on one drive can get clustered alot, compared to spreading out applications on two drives.
Best seen on a simple test like copying large files from one place to another on the same drive, compared to the speed it can be done from drive to drive. Seek times are really hurt from having the head move back and forth a zillion times.
winnieB
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September 27th, 2006 05:00