Hi all, comparing hdds anyone know if a RAID 0 SATA III 500gb will out perform a Seagate 500GB hybrid? Im guessing RAID 0 will be better. But wasn't sure thanks
What drives are you looking at, what system will they be going in, and what will they be used for? That sort of info can tell us what sort of comparison you're looking to make, and what should be best for you. Advice for now - As for SATA III hard drives, mechanical hard drives aren't fast enough yet to even reach SATA II speeds, so there's no point buying in to them specifically - while the controller may be different, spinning platters haven't really broken the 300MB/s mark unless you're talking 15000rpm drives, which most consumers will NEVER go near. As my good buddy Admiral Ackbar says:
I bought four Spinpoint F3s and couldn't get my Crosshair IV to run them with onboard controller and as I couldn't be bothered with the hassle of a controller gave up and used them all as individual drives - which of course Windows didn't like and sprawled out across the whole array. Friend of mine says you have to press a hotkey and it takes you to AMD Raid but it's too late for me to try it now.
it completely depends upon what you're after doing with it... Well, a R0 HDD array will (only) gain significantly with large sequential r/ws (assuming fragmentation is under control), but the hybrid will gain even more significantly with any smaller reads that occur from the SSD cache... ...so it depends upon your data usage type as to which is more important. Personally though, i'd highly recommend going for a separate SSD & HDD build instead & separate out the usage types myself.
Hi all thanks for the feed back. so more details... its for basiclly a little vmware server im building. OS will be on SSD, i was looking to then add another ssd for the important vms and then for the rest point um at either the hybrid or raid 0 spindles.. I was orginally looking at the OCZ revo hybrid (http://www.ebuyer.com/284731-ocz-re...id-state-drive-pci-e-read-910mb-s-rvdhy-fh-1t) but reading reviews its really not that great a beast (and at the time of review had to be the C drive which would course a slight problem!) and for £400 i could spend cash on a ssd and spindle as a replacement that might be better option.. so yes its going to be a lot of random reads.. some pretty heavy use with multi vms on the go at once. MaverickWill - sata 3 spindle facts are really interesting.. i knew the spindle would also be bottleneck but yeah that really puts in perspective! thanks The Protocol - RAID configs was also a concern.. Ive never tried using RAID on a personnel pc before so wasn't sure if even came down to If you use mobo RAID does it have to be the C boot drive?! PocketDemon - i thought raid 0 was generally quicker on seq and random r/w. then say a single spindle. I wasnt sure in comp to the hybrid but im guessing your saying its not to much of an improvement.. thanks all for the input.. great help so far if anyone wants to compare with throwing in the ocz revo please do
Right, afaik, what all of the hybrid drives do is to prioritise smaller files which are read as this is where the most significant gains are - this is naturally the case with something like the Seagate Momentus which only has a SSD component in the MB range - not the GB range. Now, again afaik (based on playing with VMware Workstation in the past & info from Diskeeper), a virtual machine is stored as a single large file & this is the only way that it can 'normally' be accessed from outside of the virtual machine itself... [NB Diskeeper have a product that can defrag within a virtual machine file to improve speeds, but otherwise you're treating it as a single large file] ...which i believe means that the hybrids could not move a sub-part of a virtual machine into the SSD cache. Then, whilst the virtual machine is a single file, the data within it will be called in whatever order it happens to be - much the same as a 'normal' OS installation with some apps would be - so it will have similar improvements with large unfragmented sequential r/ws with HDDs in R0, but next to zero real life improvement for a normal user using an OS with small r/ws. [NB the same, to a large extent, also applies to SSDs in R0 but for a different reason - with them, it's about the data r/w compared to the page size & the chances of the next r/w being on a different nand device &/or controller &/or SSD... A single SSD working basically as a R0 device internally of course, but gaining dramatically from lower access times &, to a greater or lesser extent based on the model, in built error correction, ECC, etc. So, with SSDs, it's about trading improved small r/ws with fewer higher capacity SSDs against improved larger r/ws with more SSDs (& the cost) to get the best balance for your personal usage type... For me, the loss of the former is more than made up for by the gains in the latter when i went for 4x 50/60GB V2s vs either 2x 100/120GB or 1x 200/240GB... ...but with the newer 6GB/s SSDs, the 100/120GB is the best speed for the money option - & you'd multiply up from them.] &, naturally, there's no redundancy with a normal R0 array (though people 'should' back stuff up of course whether they're using single drives or arrays of any type). So, for your purposes, it would be so highly unlikely (you'd need to be doing something quite specific) that you'd see any r.l. gain at all from either a hybrid drive or a HDD R0 array as to make neither of them worth bothering with. That being the case, if i was looking at increasing speeds for this purpose, i'd either go with a single fast (non-hybid) HDD & cost putting some money into getting Diskeeper's V-locity... ...or (& this would be by far my preferred choice - not least as it's much cheaper) get either a larger SSD or a 2nd SSD (whether R0'ing them or not) solely for the extra VM's (it not needing defragging - but ideally one with a very good GC since i'm 99.9999% sure that trim commands would not be passed on from within a VM).
