SSD or Velociraptor or RAid0

[RabidDog]

WHats the best bang for the Buck?

Cheapest probably to get a second drive to match an existing SATA drive and give raid0 a go
2nd cheapest Get a small velociraptor (74gb) and stick the OS on that or
Most Bucks.. get a Small SSD and stick the OS on that? (actually this the least likely option as I dont know enough about these devices and they are still TOO expensive..

Somehow the NEW SSD make the Veloc seem reasonable?

[makntraks]

WHats the best bang for the Buck?

Cheapest probably to get a second drive to match an existing SATA drive and give raid0 a go
2nd cheapest Get a small velociraptor (74gb) and stick the OS on that or
Most Bucks.. get a Small SSD and stick the OS on that? (actually this the least likely option as I dont know enough about these devices and they are still TOO expensive..

Somehow the NEW SSD make the Veloc seem reasonable?

Check out http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3532 for some interesting reading - SSD versus Enterprise SAS and SATA disks.

makntraks

[nic2k4]

When you're talking bang for buck the only answer is the largest drive you can get as their $/MB is the lowest. But you seem to be hinting at the drive speed here. In this case you might be right in your assumption about the velociraptor, but a RAID 0 setup might just be enough. The problem with that is safety, RAID 0 can become corrupted and you lose all your data. A better answer might be RAID 0+1, but that raises the cost as you need one more HDD for the mirror part. For maximum speed and safety RAID 5 is the answer, but forget about price here. Another solution that is more economical is explained here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html

Is all of this needed just to boot windows faster? Todays drives have fast enough transfer rates for capturing video without dropping frames. I don't know that shaving a few seconds off boot time is worth the expense.

There are a many reviews on the net dealing with that and I recently saw one comparing the drives you're asking about. I just can't remember where it was, but here's a nice one to start with:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-terabyte-1tb,2077.html

[edDV]

I agree, when you talk bang for buck, what is the bang that comes with faster drives? Fast enough is what counts and anything greater or equal to ATA-100 is fast enough for most all video related tasks other than real time uncompressed.

[rallynavvie]

I also take issue with the words "trusted" and "Raid 0" in the same sentence.

[MpegEncoder]

I run a linux machine using 2 - 320GB SATA II 3Gb/s 7200RPM drives and it's great.

Very fast (yes, I now about the failure potential).

[redwudz]

I've had several RAID 0 failures in the past and had to completely restore the OS twice with Acronis. Those were HDD failures and I lost everything not backed up. The others were mostly array failures. Array failures are fairly simple, just restore the array and usually no data is lost. But it was a PITA and not too dependable. It was fast, but not worth the problems, IMO. I might use it again for capture drives, but never again for the boot drive. Since then, HDDs have become faster and I see less need for RAID 0.

I have ordered a 60GB SSD OCZ unit, and I'll be trying that out for a boot drive on a Vista Ultimate system in the next week. But even SSD units take a bit of 'tinkering' to get the best performance.

[RabidDog]

Really it was for general all round system performance.. yes windows does boot slow.. I have ruled out raid 5 as the size of hard disk's grows.Plus raid5 is slower than a single disk. I was thinking of that same ocz but in the end I'll probably opt for
;
None of the above!
I'll just get a S/h W/s monitor for £40 and a blue-ray drive also £45.
Shift my existing disks about so I am booting off the fastest drive (7200,Sata) and forgo Raid0. Short stroking sounds like it its more hassle than its worth, if even possible under xp. SSd still too expensive and untried.
Veloci? Is the speed increase worth the extra dosh and loss of space: I'm unsure?

Quad core cpu would be nice(just for encoding to x264), but I am uncertain as to mobo compatability with modern CPU's. Nvidia says one thing, Gigabyte says another.

[Webster]

I have ordered a 60GB SSD OCZ unit, and I'll be trying that out for a boot drive on a Vista Ultimate system in the next week. But even SSD units take a bit of 'tinkering' to get the best performance.

This is quite true. Unless you spent a lots of buck for the single-level cell (SLC), sometime the multi-level cell (MLC) SSD run slower than an actual hard drive.
Another peculiar thing I found out on my system. I have a 64GB SSD (MLC) in my netbook (Acer) and I found that it run much faster when format as FAT32. If I formated it as NTFS, I'd got a 15-20% slower (with swap/temp file run from RAM-disk).........

[rallynavvie]

Really it was for general all round system performance.. yes windows does boot slow.. I have ruled out raid 5 as the size of hard disk's grows.Plus raid5 is slower than a single disk.

I never understand why Windows boot speed is used as a benchmark. I think I reboot maybe once a month otherwise the system is left on 24/7. After working with Dell and HP workstations the ones that get turned off and on a lot fail in about half the time as those that are left on (as long as there is proper ventilation).

I don't know what RAID 5 you're talking about but it isn't the one I'm running in all my servers! RAID 5 starts as a 3-disk array: two striped and one parity. You should be getting the same bandwidth as RAID 0 with this setup. Still if the array or a drive fails you'll be out of order until it can rebuild itself. As such I only use it for non-critical storage whereas my applications and SQL are running on RAID 10.

I use the WD Raptors as boot drives, have been for years now. My 74GB lasted about 4 years and then I got a new one via RMA. I'm running a 150GB in the main workstation. I may have to change that to a 300GB model as I've been lazy at removing games I haven't finished so really space has never been a pressing issue with these. Everyone should be using a single drive for their OS and applications and offloading everything else to other drives as this will go a long way toward keeping performance up. Remember that faster rotational speeds don't mean higher bandwidth they only increase your seek times. This is helpful for multi-tasking or for running huge databases but doesn't mean you're going to see faster video encoding times or applications loading quicker.

[RabidDog]

I don't regard boot times as any indicator of performance, but my system is not left on 24/7,runs too hot and noisy, possibly booted many times per day. RAid5 is not an option as it wouldn't be run on a dedicated controller. faster speeds will DECREASE seek times?. I didn't realize raptors had a five year warranty. makes them a better value proposition.
I am now going the other way (fickle consumer) and looking at green,large drives(1-1.5tb) that can be left on all day, used for video-starage and playback (pun intended). Possibly dual booting into linux for web browsing sessions only. Well tempted to try out Windows7 as it is reportedly quite quick..
I can wait for Raptors to follow SSD's down in price.



*we're all going to die in 2012 anyway

[rallynavvie]

Faster rotational speeds decrease seek times, yes. 10k rpm drives (and 15k rpm SAS ones) have much faster seek times than 7200rpm and lower drives. 15krpm SAS are wonderful when running a monster SQL server. I think all WD drives are covered by the same warranty but make sure to look before you buy.

Instead of dual-booting you might want to consider virtualization. I own a copy of VMware Workstation (in addition to a load of other VMware software) and run Ubuntu x64, Windows 7, XP Pro, and Win2k Pro simultaneously on the same machine. With the specs of your box you should be able to run a second OS in a virtual machine. Workstation 6.5 isn't cheap but you may just want to download VMware Player and then download a pre-built appliance with Linux. In fact there is a browser appliance made just for internet surfing with Firefox. Great way to "try before you buy".