Storage array: Bare drives, SS, RAID, SSD, or other?

[Viceroy]

Obviously the basic hierarchy would go SSD(Intel x25-m; OCZ) > 10k(Velociraptor) > 7.2k(Spinpoint F3; Caviar Black; Barracuda) > 5.4k(Caviar Green), but I am curious to see the relative performance of these drives when short-stroked or put into a RAID array so that I can better decide which combination of storage devices would be of the greatest benefit to me, with price and hassle of course factored in. General ideas are welcome, but I believe what would help me the most are benchmarks and numbers and graphs.

Thanks.

[gingerbee]

well then drop the ssd you don't use them just for storage. Buy some 1 terabyters with a good warranty and try looking through storage section it has all the benchmarks your looking for. A lot of us have already done the whole ssd verses hd and the whole short stroke thing to and are benchmarks are there for them all

[bojangles]

Yeah the 7200.12 1TB drives and the Black 1TB drives would be great for storage, as they still have a decent speed with them too. I personally wouldn't shortstroke storage HDDs because you want more reliability than speed. It's the best way to go. RAID 0 for storage is a big no no.

Storage means holding data that you do not want to risk to lose, so a RAID 5 or RAID 1 array would best suit the security/reliability front.

Now if you're confusing us, meaning you're using it as an OS drive, then SSD would be the best possible way to gain a performance boost, even faster than RAIDing two drives or more. Shortstroking is kind of a waste now that SSDs are more affordable now.

Have a look in this sub-forum. We have a thread in here about shortstroking drives (I forget who did it). We also have plenty of reviews of HDDs and SSDs here so go ahead and read those too.

[Sushi Warrior]

Originally Posted by bojangles

Yeah the 7200.12 1TB drives and the Black 1TB drives would be great for storage, as they still have a decent speed with them too. I personally wouldn't shortstroke storage HDDs because you want more reliability than speed. It's the best way to go. RAID 0 for storage is a big no no.

Storage means holding data that you do not want to risk to lose, so a RAID 5 or RAID 1 array would best suit the security/reliability front.

Now if you're confusing us, meaning you're using it as an OS drive, then SSD would be the best possible way to gain a performance boost, even faster than RAIDing two drives or more. Shortstroking is kind of a waste now that SSDs are more affordable now.

Have a look in this sub-forum. We have a thread in here about shortstroking drives (I forget who did it). We also have plenty of reviews of HDDs and SSDs here so go ahead and read those too.

Pfft, I know someone with 20 drives in Raid0 and none have ever failed on him.

[bojangles]

Originally Posted by Sushi Warrior

Pfft, I know someone with 20 drives in Raid0 and none have ever failed on him.

Does he use it for storage or OS? And with 20 drives in RAID 0 he should have at least considered RAID 5 for a bit of redundancy. Obviously he takes the risk, but what if one drive does fail on him? Data will be lost no matter what and the array will be broken. Nobody ever needs the speed of 20 drives in RAID 0. It's obviously for e-peen and nothing else. Benchmarking only.

[gingerbee]

Originally Posted by Sushi Warrior

Pfft, I know someone with 20 drives in Raid0 and none have ever failed on him.

well i think that wins silly quote of the month doesn't it i mean 20 hd in raid0 not only silly but almost pointless

[Sushi Warrior]

Originally Posted by gingerbee

well i think that wins silly quote of the month doesn't it i mean 20 hd in raid0 not only silly but almost pointless

He does have 20 drives. All in RAID0. He uses an SSD for OS. He backs it up on another array IIRC. I can post pics and benchmarks dude, he gets like 1.5mb/s when he's using like 12 drives.

[bojangles]

Originally Posted by Sushi Warrior

He does have 20 drives. All in RAID0. He uses an SSD for OS. He backs it up on another array IIRC. I can post pics and benchmarks dude, he gets like 1.5mb/s when he's using like 12 drives.

See now I don't even understand. You can't split a RAID 0 array of 20 drives into 12. Are you saying he has many arrays of those 20 drives. Oh and by the way, 1.5 MB/s is hella slow.

Why he has 20 drives in RAID 0 and not using it for his OS is beyond me. Obviously it would be much faster than an SSD in that case.

For some reason I call BS on this one.

[Sushi Warrior]

Originally Posted by bojangles

See now I don't even understand. You can't split a RAID 0 array of 20 drives into 12. Are you saying he has many arrays of those 20 drives. Oh and by the way, 1.5 MB/s is hella slow.

Why he has 20 drives in RAID 0 and not using it for his OS is beyond me. Obviously it would be much faster than an SSD in that case.

For some reason I call BS on this one.

He had 20 but he downgraded to 12 as he didn't need that much storage and he ran out of case space. Large arrays are terribly slow for OS as there are simply too many drives - think of it like a huge army mobilizing versus a small one. He's a huge leecher (goes to massive LAN's and DL's terabytes worth of data, mostly large files) so it makes a LOT of sense for him. Large arrays are great for big files, not small ones. I can post pics and benches, just tell me if you want me to.

[bojangles]

I still don't see the point of RAID 0'ing a large amount of drives when you can't even utilize the bandwidth in everyday applications. You can only write as fast as the other guy's HDD is going and how fast the network connection is, so really it's plain stupid of him to put 12 HDDs in RAID 0 if nobody else is going to give him the bandwidth. He may as well not even RAID them to be honest. He'll get the same amount of storage. I have yet to see a file over 60GB.