Two 2"5 disks in RAID or one single 3"5 disk ?

[vortex33]

My question is, for who have already experimented this situation : which is better between
- two 2"5 disks in RAID
- one single 3"5 performant disk (but no Raptor, just performant 7200 HD)

I'm looking for silent, of course, but want have nice performance too for my desktop computer. And my guess is that a single 2"5 is not enought...
The price of 2"5 disks are of course more expensive but low enought to compare this 2 configurations

Any idea ?

[MikeC]

For most desktop apps, RAID does not give much of a performance benefit. You're better off looking at 7200rpm SATA 2.5" drives if you cannot soft mount 3.5" drives. If you can soft mount them, then try a WD SE16. We've had pretty quiet samples. See reviews in the Storage section. Latency is the same ~4.2ms for 7200rpm drives, whether 2.5" or 3.5". Seek might still be a touch better in 3.5" drives, but we're talking just 1ms difference here.

[Steve_Y]

In my media centre I'm currently using two 80Gb Hitachi 5K100s in a RAID 0. That's mainly because I happened to pick up two identical drives quite cheaply and prefered to have a single 160Gb partition. I definitely wasn't bothering with RAID 0 for the theoretical speed boost it promises. Having said that, I do think the RAID configuration makes a difference when transfering backing up the drives, or transferring large files over my gigabit network.

It would be interesting to compare the speed of a single 7200RPM 2.5" drive to a couple of 5400RPM drives in a RAID 0. RAID 0 may not increase speed much in most circumstances, but the real world tests of 7200RPM 2.5" drives that I've seen indicate that their faster RPM doesn't often make a huge difference either. I was originally planning to get a 7K100 after SPCR's review of it, but for roughly the price of an 80Gb 7K100 I picked up two 80Gb 5K100s. Even if a single 7K100 would be faster than my RAID 0, in my opinion it isn't really worth paying twice as much for that extra speed.

Of course the quietest 3.5" drives don't make much noise when soft mounted or enclosed, but in my opinion there are other reasons to consider 2.5" drives than just their lower noise. I think that their biggest advantage is the small amount of heat that they produce. Without much airflow it's easy for a suspended 3.5" hard drive to hit dangerous temperatures, if you put the drive in an enclosure you have to be really careful that it doesn't cook. 2.5" drives take all the hassle out of it, even with minimal airflow they'll generally stay cool. Mine are in home made gel pack enclosures in an Acoustipack lined case, even though they aren't particularly quiet by 2.5" drive standards they're completely inaudible @1m, and even under heavy use they usually stay under 40C.

[aidanjm2004]

Stick with a single 2.5 inch drive, use 2 Gig of memory, and switch to Vista (when released) using the ReadyBoost caching technology with a 1 or 2 gig flash memory USB 2.0 key.