I'm upgrading the drives in my RAID array from 80GB to 120GB, and I'm wondering if it's worth it to have the ATA133 vs ATA100, as well as the 8MB cache vs the 2MB cache, not to mention, which company will perform better in RAID 0; Seagate, Western Digital or Maxtor? Right now I've got a pair of Maxtor 80GB 6Y080L0 drives in the system (ATA133, 7200rpm, 2MB cache) and was wondering what if any performance hit I would take if I went to say a pair of Seagate ST3120022A (ATA100, 7200rpm, 2MB)? or maybe even a pair of Western Digital WD1200BB (ATA100, 7200rpm, 2MB) or even the WD1200JB (ATA100, 7200rpm, 8MB) or a set of Maxtor 6Y120L0 (ATA133, 7200rpm, 2MB) or the 6Y120P0 (ATA133, 7200rpm, 8MB)? I should mention that I have an Epox 8K3A+ with the Highpoint RAID, which will support ATA133. The other thought is that I upgrade my video card from my current Asus GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB to a new Radeon 9600Pro 256MB... which seems more logical?
This might be off topic, but i hope i can get some help I have two Seagate Barracuda 1. 20GB 2. 80GB Both are ST32011A the 20GB is 1+ year old, where as the 80GB is 2 months old. I forgot, the specs of the hdds, i think the 80GB supports Ultra ATA 133 as for the 20GB, i am not so sure So here's my problem, which hdd should i use as my system ? does the 80GB perform better or is it the same ? I prefer to store all my music and movies in the bigger one, and using it as second disk drive I have 8GB of music and about 20GB of movies I am using NF7-S Rev.2.0 mobo
Impossible. Also, please don't thread hi-jack. Go start your own thread. It's bad forum etiquette to ignore the original poster and put in your slightly related question as the first reply.
I'd keep all the drives the same. Considering the controller you're using isn't what I'd call high-performance, speed really isn't a factor. For simplicity sake, it'd probably be better to stick to the Maxtor drives - they're quiet and quick, and they're generally quite cheap.
Re: Re: Hard Drive ATA thats the funny part, the seagates end up the cheapest... so i figure i'm going to upgrade to a pair of seagate 2mb cache drives
Fair enough. Seagates are damned good drives, if not the fastest. But, you're using RAID 0 so speed isn't such a huge issue. Actually, now that you mention it - Seagates were only slightly more expensive than Samsung when we got the 3x 160Gb drives for the server in the house. The Samsungs were out of stock, so we got the Seagates. We're running the three drives in a RAID 5 array giving redundancy and 320Gb of space. It's running off a Highpoint RocketRAID 454 4-channel card.
Personally, I don't buy Seagates... they all tend to die pretty quickly on me.... my friends too.... might be made in a different place though, I'm not sure, as most of the people on these forums have nothing but praise for them.
My Seagates have been great, incredible quiet and not bad performance either (though hardly anything to write home about). ATA133 really won't offer any speed increase over ATA100 so that's not a problem. If you want speed go for 8meg cache WD or Maxtors, but otherwise it really won't make much difference.
it really is luck of the draw with hard drives nowadays. I had a seagate die on me. Ive also got a ibm deathstar (deskstar!) that has been running none stop for 3 or 4 years now!
