3x Samsung sp2504c vs WD raptor 150gb

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3x Samsung sp2504c in raid-5 vs WD Raptor 150gb

3x Samsung sp2504c in raid-5
4
24%
WD Raptor 150gb
9
53%
Neither. Reason?
4
24%
 
Total votes: 17

Erssa
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3x Samsung sp2504c vs WD raptor 150gb

Post by Erssa » Tue Feb 14, 2006 8:28 am

Many motherboards have raid-5 controller these days and with the current price of HDDs, raid-5 is coming a very viable solution for storage. Raptor on the other hand is the fastest single drive there is and has beaten 7200rpm raid-0 configurations in tests. Price is almost equal. Considering silence, value and performance, which one would you choose?

3x 250gb Samsung drives in raid-5. Total of 300$ @ newegg

Pros:
- More then three times (500gb) the storage of raptor
- Can tolerate the failure of one drive without losing data
- Cheaper and faster and more secure then any single 500gb drive

Cons:
- Risk of losing a drive is 3x bigger compared to single drive
- More heat
- More noise
- Tricky to suspend
- Installation can be a pain

or

Western Digitals new Flagship: 150 gb Raptor. 286$ @ newegg

Pros:
- Very likely faster then the Samsungs in raid-5
- 2 years longer warranty
- Enterprise class reliability
- Less idle noise
- Less heat
- Better solution for small cases

Cons:
- Data not as safe
- Less storage (but enough for most people)
- Price per gigabit

~El~Jefe~
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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Tue Feb 14, 2006 9:08 am

eh hm.

This is complicated. I would say that none of these are going to be silent. 3 drives all have different tones and the combined sound of three of them on all the time is not quiet at all. 1 drive is the way to go normally.

I have yet to see someone on here do a review of a suspended 150 gb raptor. It supposedly has more noise. I am an advocate of using a firewire external 250 gb drive and using a super perfect internal drive that is also quiet. I just have realized that I never have needed more than 60 gigs of space. a 74 gb solution would be perfect, calling it close though. I wonder how the raptor150 would be suspended. It is worth a shot, you could always always sell it on ebay for not a huge loss. shrug?

what does anyone really need with a high performance drive anyways? If you have that much cash, I would get one of the new MikeC reviewed large notebook drives instead. 2 gigs of ram trump faster hd's for performance in windows, maybe there you can do something better

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Post by JazzJackRabbit » Tue Feb 14, 2006 2:55 pm

Just a point, I wouldn't say 3 samsungs in raid 5 are going to be cheaper because you will need a good raid 5 card. I'm not aware of any mainstream motherboards that come with raid 5 support. Even if they do it most likely going to be a software solution which will bring your system down to a crawl. Only high end opteron/xeon server motherboards have integrated hardware raid 5 support.

sanse
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Post by sanse » Tue Feb 14, 2006 2:55 pm

~El~Jefe~ wrote:I have yet to see someone on here do a review of a suspended 150 gb raptor. It supposedly has more noise.
the wd raptor is no longer a noisy drive since it is equipped with fluid dynamic bearings. it's more or less as noisy or silent as a samsung spinpoint.

sanse
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Re: 3x Samsung sp2504c vs WD raptor 150gb

Post by sanse » Tue Feb 14, 2006 2:58 pm

Erssa wrote:Many motherboards have raid-5 controller these days and with the current price of HDDs, raid-5 is coming a very viable solution for storage.
i would take the raptor for your systemdrive (a smaller version less than 150gb will do then) and a samsung spinpoint for your datadrive.

raid 5 makes things a lot slower and having a good backup on a drive on another place is still necessary.

all imho of course.

Erssa
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Post by Erssa » Tue Feb 14, 2006 4:01 pm

~El~Jefe~ wrote:what does anyone really need with a high performance drive anyways? If you have that much cash, I would get one of the new MikeC reviewed large notebook drives instead. 2 gigs of ram trump faster hd's for performance in windows, maybe there you can do something better
HD performance is still the biggest bottle neck in computers.
JazzJackRabbit wrote:Just a point, I wouldn't say 3 samsungs in raid 5 are going to be cheaper because you will need a good raid 5 card. I'm not aware of any mainstream motherboards that come with raid 5 support. Even if they do it most likely going to be a software solution which will bring your system down to a crawl. Only high end opteron/xeon server motherboards have integrated hardware raid 5 support.
Just to name a few boards that have the raid-5 controller: Asus A8N-VM CSM, Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-9, Foxconn 6150K8MA-8EKRS, ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, ASUS A8N-SLI Premium, DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 SLI-DR, MSI K8N Diamond Plus, ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe, MSI K8NGM2-FID... I only listed s939 motherboards, other sockets have raid-5 motherboards as well and there are still tons of other I just don't feel like listing them all here... My motherboard was among the listed and Sanses motherboard has a controller as well. Raid-5 is one of the most common features to make a difference between premium and mainstream motherboard (with gb lan or dual gb lan).
sanse wrote:i would take the raptor for your systemdrive (a smaller version less than 150gb will do then) and a samsung spinpoint for your datadrive.
raid 5 makes things a lot slower and having a good backup on a drive on another place is still necessary. all imho of course.
Raid-5 indeed makes things a whole lot faster, not slower. It has faster read performance then raid-0 array, however write benefits are only very little due to parity overhead. Basically, It has the benefits of both striping and mirroring. Having a backup is not necessary, if a drive fails raid-5 can still function, and it can rebuild the array when you replace the failed drive.

Imo Having raptor and another drive as storage isn't worth it. First of all it's a lot more expensive, and even then your data is still not safe, but instead you have 2 HDDs that can fail. And imo the single raptor configuration loses the speed/silence benefit that it has when it is the only drive.

So far I can just say that it has suprised me how little people on this forum know of raid-5... Granted this is a silence oriented forum, but pretty strong opinions on raid-5 without solid information to back them up... I wouldn't be suprised, if the 3 of you owned Asus A8N-SLI motherboards and had raid-5 controllers in your motherboard...

As for the software raid... It's a great solution aswell, but not that good in a home computer, because software raid can really slow down the computer because of parity calculations. My friend has 8x 300gb Maxtors in software raid-5 array in his server. 8 sata port raid-5 card would be really expensive, so software is real handy here. Having many drives on raid-5 array is also benefitial because, the amount of parity data is counted (n-1/n) where n is the number of hardrives in array. So he uses only total of 300gb from the 2.4Tb for parity information. And the read performance is exceptional, since the information is divided on 8 HDDs. He has had some problems with the drives sometimes and the array continues to function even with a loss of a HD and when the problem is fixed he has rebuilded the array even without the need to reboot the system.

I wouldn't consider the smaller raptors anymore now that the 150gb version is here. 74gb and 36gb are much much slower then the 150gb. Even a 2x 74gb raid-0 array looses to single 150gb. Not to mention the fact that both of the smaller hard drives have worse price/gb ratio. 150gb is big enough to be the only drive of a system.

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Re: 3x Samsung sp2504c vs WD raptor 150gb

Post by Shining Arcanine » Tue Feb 14, 2006 4:21 pm

Erssa wrote:Cheaper and faster and more secure then any single 500gb drive
More secure, perhaps, but definitely not cheaper and faster. RAID-5 is designed to sacrafice speed so that the amount of space avaliable after the parity data is maximized. If you want to maximize performance, buy the Raptor.

Erssa
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Re: 3x Samsung sp2504c vs WD raptor 150gb

Post by Erssa » Tue Feb 14, 2006 5:28 pm

Shining Arcanine wrote:
Erssa wrote:Cheaper and faster and more secure then any single 500gb drive
More secure, perhaps, but definitely not cheaper and faster. RAID-5 is designed to sacrafice speed so that the amount of space avaliable after the parity data is maximized. If you want to maximize performance, buy the Raptor.
I don't follow your math. 3x 100$ is 300$, no cost for the raid-controller, consider it's provided by motherboard. Cheapest 500gb drive in newegg is Maxtor and it costs 325$. Hitachi and WD 500gbs are 395$ and Seagate is around 350$. Imo 300$ is cheaper then the alternatives.

RAID-5 only suffers from slower random write speeds, but the read speeds are very fast. Read speeds are imo much more important, it is what makes OS feel responsive and snappy. Anyway performance isn't everything. Raid-5 is just very versatile. It gives performance boost and safety with the cost of total hard drive space.

I'm not asking advices on what to buy. I am interested in knowing which one of these options would people here at SPCR pick. What kind of values do people have conserning storage. Raptor vs Samsung array is pretty equal in price, but they are very different solutions. The other is fail safe 500gb of storage with 3 HDDs making noise, although this HDDs are one of the most silent 3.5" drives. And the other option is the fastest drive there is, but with a much smaller capasity and slighly more vulnerable data. Although people in general don't tend to be scared of losing their data. I wonder, if anyone here at SPCR has raid-5 array in his computer...

I will probably go for either one or these options in the future. Atm Raptor seems more likely, because the prices are pretty low in Germany. Cheapest I can find on quick googling are 255e. But in that case, I would copy an image from current HDD with norton ghost and just transfer it to the Raptor and then retire this HDD and keep it as a back up image, just in case something happens. Small price to pay, compared to the headache of losing everything.
Although there is a chance I could go for the raid-5 configuration. Time will tell. I'm still don't have the extra cash to make things happen.

TomZ
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Post by TomZ » Tue Feb 14, 2006 5:42 pm

Easy choice - Raptor easily. Simpler setup, simpler life, quieter, etc.

What you might want to consider is to put in a single Raptor now, and then add another one later as RAID0 or RAID1 (depending on your preference) when prices drop a little more.

Erssa
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Post by Erssa » Tue Feb 14, 2006 5:56 pm

TomZ wrote:Easy choice - Raptor easily. Simpler setup, simpler life, quieter, etc.

What you might want to consider is to put in a single Raptor now, and then add another one later as RAID0 or RAID1 (depending on your preference) when prices drop a little more.
Neither RAID0 or RAID1 would be viable options for me. First of all, I prefer Image copy method instead of RAID1. Less noise and the HDD is securely in a different place. So if there is a water accident, fire or something similar, both drives aren't lost. And as you said, it is simpler... I'm not a fan of RAID0, twice the risk of losing data and 2 x 150gb raptors is a bit an overkill. Also those raptors are expensive, I would probably feel like a bastard for just buying one :), a happy bastard that is, but 2...

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Post by TomZ » Tue Feb 14, 2006 6:12 pm

OK, sounds good. I use 2x74GB Raptors with RAID1, because my machine is my work machine, and I depend on it a lot. I can't really afford to have any downtime. I also use automated ZIP-based backups to a remote server that run every night.

We've got quite a few Raptors here in the office and have been pleased with them. The 74's in my PC are quiet, but there is some seek noise that I plan to work on still. But I don't have any audible rotational noise. I would assume the 150's are similar, but I haven't tried them, so I can't say for sure.

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Post by Bicster » Tue Feb 14, 2006 7:01 pm

I'm about to build a "quiet" SAN box using S939 and 5 x Samsung SP2504C in RAID-5 using Linux md. The 5th SP2504C will be a spare, so the array capacity will be 750GB. I'm using one of the Supermicro 5x3 SATA mobile racks. Since the box will be doing nothing but storage tasks, I see software RAID-5 as a beneift. It will be faster than hardware RAID, and I will be more empowered to recover my data if something goes seriously awry. CPU utilization is not an issue in this case. It's not going to be completely silent, but it'll be locked up in my data closet where it doesn't need to be.

For a desktop machine, I think software RAID-1 is okay if you like that sort of thing. (I think no RAID with an offline copy usually makes more sense.) Software RAID-5 will perform well but use a lot of CPU cycles. The read performance of RAID-5 is great, and with today's fast CPU's and I/O the write performance is not terrible, but it will still be a drain on your CPU. I would not be surprised if the RAID won performance benchmarks while the Raptor was faster in real-world use.

As others have pointed out, the single Raptor solution is a lot simpler, and there's something to be said for that. I've had enough trouble with software RAID-1 sets getting out of sync (Silicon Image chip/bios/driver) that I'd never trust a Windows software RAID-5 with my data. I think it's just asking for trouble.

For your case, I'd go with a single Raptor, but spend another $150 for an external hard drive I can make backups to. If that's not in the budget, then two SP2504C's, one internal and one external, would do the trick.

RAID is never a substitute for backups. RAID protects you from hardware failures, but it won't protect you from yourself, or malicious attacks, etc.

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Post by bexx » Tue Feb 14, 2006 7:25 pm

Why not one 74GB raptor and one 250GB samsung? Pretty darn fast boot drive yet still twice as much space total as the 150GB raptor. Guess it depends on space needs, if 150GB is enough I'd get the raptor, if I needed more I'd get the slower raptor and additional storage drives.. and if I needed even more get 74 and 2 250s :P.

Anyways, I would not use software raid5 for my main root drive (which is what 'onboard' raid is). Poor seeks and poor writes are not going to be made up by some sustained read speed. I don't dislike raid5, I have 4 samsung drives in software raid5 (just bought the 5th tonight yay!), but its just for storage. I use another drive for hte main os. I mean go to storagereview and they won't even recommend raid0 for an os drive saying 2 seperate drives will be faster.

Oh yea as for 'data not as safe' raid (5,1) is for uptime, its not a substitue for backups. Whatever choice you make you still should keep backups.

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Re: 3x Samsung sp2504c vs WD raptor 150gb

Post by Shining Arcanine » Tue Feb 14, 2006 7:28 pm

Erssa wrote:I don't follow your math. 3x 100$ is 300$, no cost for the raid-controller, consider it's provided by motherboard. Cheapest 500gb drive in newegg is Maxtor and it costs 325$. Hitachi and WD 500gbs are 395$ and Seagate is around 350$. Imo 300$ is cheaper then the alternatives.
I was thinking of with a dedicated RAID-5 controller as you had said faster and the RAID controller chips that come with motherboards are not particularly fast when it comes to RAID-5.
Erssa wrote:RAID-5 only suffers from slower random write speeds, but the read speeds are very fast. Read speeds are imo much more important, it is what makes OS feel responsive and snappy. Anyway performance isn't everything. Raid-5 is just very versatile. It gives performance boost and safety with the cost of total hard drive space.
Only at sequential reads. All other reads are slow as the heads are not aligned.
Erssa wrote:I'm not asking advices on what to buy. I am interested in knowing which one of these options would people here at SPCR pick. What kind of values do people have conserning storage. Raptor vs Samsung array is pretty equal in price, but they are very different solutions. The other is fail safe 500gb of storage with 3 HDDs making noise, although this HDDs are one of the most silent 3.5" drives. And the other option is the fastest drive there is, but with a much smaller capasity and slighly more vulnerable data. Although people in general don't tend to be scared of losing their data. I wonder, if anyone here at SPCR has raid-5 array in his computer...
People at SPCR try to minimize their PC's noise output so that means only one drive. Chances are you will be hard pressed to find anyone here running a RAID-5 array.
Erssa wrote:I will probably go for either one or these options in the future. Atm Raptor seems more likely, because the prices are pretty low in Germany. Cheapest I can find on quick googling are 255e. But in that case, I would copy an image from current HDD with norton ghost and just transfer it to the Raptor and then retire this HDD and keep it as a back up image, just in case something happens. Small price to pay, compared to the headache of losing everything.
Although there is a chance I could go for the raid-5 configuration. Time will tell. I'm still don't have the extra cash to make things happen.
Go for the Raptor, it has higher performance, lower power consumption, lower noise output and so on. The only thing it does not have going for it is redundancy.

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Post by Hellspawn » Tue Feb 14, 2006 7:28 pm

sanse wrote:
~El~Jefe~ wrote:I have yet to see someone on here do a review of a suspended 150 gb raptor. It supposedly has more noise.
the wd raptor is no longer a noisy drive since it is equipped with fluid dynamic bearings. it's more or less as noisy or silent as a samsung spinpoint.
word. I have the new 150. Quietest drive I've ever owned. Even by touching it , I feel no vibration whatsoever. I continue to be impressed by the drive, and it's precursor, the 74gb model.

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Post by Shining Arcanine » Tue Feb 14, 2006 7:37 pm

Hellspawn wrote:word. I have the new 150. Quietest drive I've ever owned. Even by touching it , I feel no vibration whatsoever. I continue to be impressed by the drive, and it's precursor, the 74gb model.
I am curious, what drives have you owned? Since SPCR has not yet reviewed the drive, I would like some figures that I can go by to get an idea of where it ranks.

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Post by Shadowknight » Tue Feb 14, 2006 8:24 pm

Hellspawn wrote:
sanse wrote:
~El~Jefe~ wrote:I have yet to see someone on here do a review of a suspended 150 gb raptor. It supposedly has more noise.
the wd raptor is no longer a noisy drive since it is equipped with fluid dynamic bearings. it's more or less as noisy or silent as a samsung spinpoint.
word. I have the new 150. Quietest drive I've ever owned. Even by touching it , I feel no vibration whatsoever. I continue to be impressed by the drive, and it's precursor, the 74gb model.
How audible is seek noise? Very? Medium? Slightly?

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Post by Tibors » Tue Feb 14, 2006 8:28 pm

Erssa wrote:Having a backup is not necessary, if a drive fails raid-5 can still function, and it can rebuild the array when you replace the failed drive.
Erssa wrote:First of all, I prefer Image copy method instead of RAID1. Less noise and the HDD is securely in a different place. So if there is a water accident, fire or something similar, both drives aren't lost.
It seems you already know one reason why your first statement is not true. RAID 5 also doesn't save you from:
  • User errors - Oops I deleted the wrong file.
  • Bugs in software - Ever seen a complex Word file (lots of OLE) where the second half of the document was automagically turned into gibberish? I have seen that too many times and was glad the company I worked for didn't think RAID 5 was enough.
  • Virus infection
  • Malicious users
  • Your mobo dies and the model is out of production. Say bye to your data or good luck finding one second hand.
You also don't seem to realise that the RAID 5 on the mobo's you list is not hardware RAID. It's work is still done through software (the driver) and the CPU. With hardware RAID there is a specialised processor that takes care of the parity.

All in all I don't see a reason to go for the loud RAID option. So I voted for the Raptor. If you need more storage, then get a fileserver. Eiter prebuild or self made from old hardware and new drives. I really wanted to vote for the "third" option. Get more memory and disable the swap. :twisted:

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Post by ~El~Jefe~ » Tue Feb 14, 2006 8:38 pm

that famous hard drive review place said that it was noisier than the 74 FDB drive.

so.... who knows. they tend to have great relative ratings on things. performance of course they are number one in testing and interpreting, but silence I leave to big Mikey C

Mikey C in da house. raise the roof. and stuff.

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Post by jasonb885 » Tue Feb 14, 2006 8:54 pm

Erssa wrote: Just to name a few boards that have the raid-5 controller: Asus A8N-VM CSM, Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-9, Foxconn 6150K8MA-8EKRS, ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, ASUS A8N-SLI Premium, DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 SLI-DR, MSI K8N Diamond Plus, ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe, MSI K8NGM2-FID... I only listed s939 motherboards, other sockets have raid-5 motherboards as well and there are still tons of other I just don't feel like listing them all here... My motherboard was among the listed and Sanses motherboard has a controller as well. Raid-5 is one of the most common features to make a difference between premium and mainstream motherboard (with gb lan or dual gb lan).
Do you mean FRAID (fake BIOS/software RAID)? You'd be better off with real software RAID or a true hardware RAID controller with the logic right on the controller. FRAID is the worst of both worlds in terms of recovery, portability, and performance.
Erssa wrote: Raid-5 indeed makes things a whole lot faster, not slower. It has faster read performance then raid-0 array, however write benefits are only very little due to parity overhead. Basically, It has the benefits of both striping and mirroring. Having a backup is not necessary, if a drive fails raid-5 can still function, and it can rebuild the array when you replace the failed drive.
No.

RAID 5 is stripping with parity only. There is _no_ mirroring component to RAID 5. Perhaps you meant RAID 1+0 or RAID 0+1?

In either case, RAID 5 is slower than an identical number of drives in a RAID 0 configuration, as stripping on RAID 5 is n-1 for any given stripe, since the parity information is on the 'final' disk. For n disks, RAID 0 is simply n, not n-1 for reads.

For writes, yes, you definitely suffer with RAID 5 over RAID 0, though.

And yes, you still need backups. When you accidently delete something of value, there is no earlier copies available. When it's gone, it's gone from the whole array. RAID is not a revision control system for changes or a backup strategy. RAID provides the ability to survive a single disk failure (in the case of RAID 5) _only_, ignoring performance characteristics.
Erssa wrote: ...
As for the software raid... It's a great solution aswell, but not that good in a home computer, because software raid can really slow down the computer because of parity calculations. My friend has 8x 300gb Maxtors in software raid-5 array in his server. 8 sata port raid-5 card would be really expensive, so software is real handy here. Having many drives on raid-5 array is also benefitial because, the amount of parity data is counted (n-1/n) where n is the number of hardrives in array. So he uses only total of 300gb from the 2.4Tb for parity information. And the read performance is exceptional, since the information is divided on 8 HDDs. He has had some problems with the drives sometimes and the array continues to function even with a loss of a HD and when the problem is fixed he has rebuilded the array even without the need to reboot the system.
Yes, that is correct.

Keep in mind when a disk fails, if you do not have a hotspare ready, you'll need to swap in a spare manually. If you don't have a cold spare, you'll need to buy one. In the meantime, while waiting for the rebuild to complete, RAID 5 will be quite slow as it reconstructs the data from the missing disk from the parity information. Moreover, if another drive fails -- it does happen -- you lose the _whole_ array. (RAID is no substitute for backups.)
Erssa wrote: I wouldn't consider the smaller raptors anymore now that the 150gb version is here. 74gb and 36gb are much much slower then the 150gb. Even a 2x 74gb raid-0 array looses to single 150gb. Not to mention the fact that both of the smaller hard drives have worse price/gb ratio. 150gb is big enough to be the only drive of a system.
Depends on how valuable your data is. I'd take 2 x 74GB over 1 x 150GB using a OS based software RAID 1 for my workstation.

But that's just me. Everyone has to assess his or her own risk scenario.

:)

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Post by Elixer » Tue Feb 14, 2006 9:25 pm

When it comes down to it is just a choice between storage and performance. Choose whichever is more important to you. I think the raptor will be a little bit quieter. I really don't understand the point of this question. You seem to understand all the pros and cons and seem to have all the necessary information in front of you, so make a choice. Personally I'd choose the three samsungs, just because I have a 200GB full right now and I'm filling a 120GB. I don't expect my storage needs to drop anytime soon so I need all the space I can get.

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Post by Hellspawn » Tue Feb 14, 2006 9:33 pm

Shining Arcanine wrote:
Hellspawn wrote:word. I have the new 150. Quietest drive I've ever owned. Even by touching it , I feel no vibration whatsoever. I continue to be impressed by the drive, and it's precursor, the 74gb model.
I am curious, what drives have you owned? Since SPCR has not yet reviewed the drive, I would like some figures that I can go by to get an idea of where it ranks.
probably no less than 30-40 drives, starting with the 10mb MFM Seagate, Micropolis SCSI, more recently Diamondmax 9+, 10+, Maxline, Samsung 160/200gb Spinpoint, Raptor 36/74, Seagate 7200.7/.8/.9, Western Digital 250, 320, Hitachi 7 series, I think you get the point. I like to play with new hardware. Actually I just picked up a 2nd one for another system for 225 shipped. OEM but still a Rap 150 :D

Quiet is always subjective, but in my opinion, the Rap 150 is the best drive I've owned, hands down in quiet, smoothness and speed. Seek noise is a bit more than some, such as the Seagates and others with AAM on, but since I suspend in the P150, no worries. Idle noise is audible from maybe 2 inches away. Even in the silicone pads, seeks are vewwy quiet. I have no numbers, I have my very sensitive ears, and that's good enough for me :roll:

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Post by scandium » Tue Feb 14, 2006 10:22 pm

Voted for the single Raptor as, by all accounts I've read so far, its pretty quiet and blazingly fast - plus it seems even if one Samsung is quieter, it doesn't seem too likely that 3 of them together will produce less noise/vibration than the single Raptor. Which leaves more drive space as the only factor in the Samsung's favour, but then that's a different criteria as I don't think anyone buys a Raptor for bulk storage :D

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Post by spolitta » Tue Feb 14, 2006 10:34 pm

why 3x sp2504c? the P120 250GB series is a lot noisier than the P120 160Gb (I own 3 250gb and 2 160gb) and the P120 160GB is noisier than the P80 160Gb SATA. so why did you choose the noisiest Samsung HD and want to compare it with such a different hard drive like the raptor 150gb, i dont know.

Let me be honest I don’t really understand your situation but if I were you I would borrow another 80 bucks and buy the raptor and a P80 Samsung 160gb; just to be on the fast and quiet side of the game.

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Re: 3x Samsung sp2504c vs WD raptor 150gb

Post by Erssa » Wed Feb 15, 2006 7:50 am

Shining Arcanine wrote:Only at sequential reads. All other reads are slow as the heads are not aligned.
Nope. Read performance is _always_ good, even if it is random read performance. The parity data blocks aren't read on data reads. So the read performance is basically just like reading on a purely striped array. Actually RAID 5 is faster on random reads then it is on sequential reads.
People at SPCR try to minimize their PC's noise output so that means only one drive. Chances are you will be hard pressed to find anyone here running a RAID-5 array.
Yes, that is true in most cases, but in some cases people need certain things e.g many hard drives, but they can still make them as quiet as possible.
It seems you already know one reason why your first statement is not true. RAID 5 also doesn't save you from:

* User errors - Oops I deleted the wrong file.
* Bugs in software - Ever seen a complex Word file (lots of OLE) where the second half of the document was automagically turned into gibberish? I have seen that too many times and was glad the company I worked for didn't think RAID 5 was enough.
* Virus infection
* Malicious users
* Your mobo dies and the model is out of production. Say bye to your data or good luck finding one second hand.
You made some pretty good points. But none of these is a big threat to me.
You also don't seem to realise that the RAID 5 on the mobo's you list is not hardware RAID. It's work is still done through software (the driver) and the CPU. With hardware RAID there is a specialised processor that takes care of the parity.

All in all I don't see a reason to go for the loud RAID option. So I voted for the Raptor. If you need more storage, then get a fileserver. Eiter prebuild or self made from old hardware and new drives. I really wanted to vote for the "third" option. Get more memory and disable the swap. Twisted Evil
Really nice response overall. I didn't realise that oboard raid is still mostly softboard raid. Thanks for correcting me on this one. You made me do a little more research. I was under the impression that the onboard sata/raid-controller did some calculations aswell, but I was wrong. However the cpu calculations do not seem very taxing, if www.gamepc.com 's arcitle is to be trusted. I put the link at the end of this post.
jasonb885 wrote:Do you mean FRAID (fake BIOS/software RAID)? You'd be better off with real software RAID or a true hardware RAID controller with the logic right on the controller. FRAID is the worst of both worlds in terms of recovery, portability, and performance.
I meant onboard raid-5, like the one provided by Sil3114, some nf4 chipsets etc... I had no idea how vague I was when I said "RAID 5 controller on motherboard". I'll try to be more clear next time.
Erssa wrote: Raid-5 indeed makes things a whole lot faster, not slower. It has faster read performance then raid-0 array, however write benefits are only very little due to parity overhead. Basically, It has the benefits of both striping and mirroring. Having a backup is not necessary, if a drive fails raid-5 can still function, and it can rebuild the array when you replace the failed drive.
No.

RAID 5 is stripping with parity only. There is _no_ mirroring component to RAID 5. Perhaps you meant RAID 1+0 or RAID 0+1?
As you can clearly, see I never claimed RAID 5 does any mirroring. I said it basically has the benefits of mirroring, which to me is; data that can sustain the loss of a hard drive. No I didn't mean RAID 0+1, RAID 10 or anything other. I know the principle of how RAID 5 works.
In either case, RAID 5 is slower than an identical number of drives in a RAID 0 configuration, as stripping on RAID 5 is n-1 for any given stripe, since the parity information is on the 'final' disk. For n disks, RAID 0 is simply n, not n-1 for reads.
I am aware that RAID 5 is slower then RAID 0.
For writes, yes, you definitely suffer with RAID 5 over RAID 0, though.
Especially on writes and especially with onboard controller. The array might perform poorer then a single Samsung and will definaltely perform worse then a single 150 raptor, no questions asked.
And yes, you still need backups. When you accidently delete something of value, there is no earlier copies available. When it's gone, it's gone from the whole array. RAID is not a revision control system for changes or a backup strategy. RAID provides the ability to survive a single disk failure (in the case of RAID 5) _only_, ignoring performance characteristics.
No I don't need backups for that. I trust myself, but I don't trust the hardware. I never delete anything by accident, especially, if it's important. Even, if I would, I could live with myself for it. However losing all the photos I have from the last 5 years, because a drive fails, would be pretty "annoying" or having to rip hundreds of CDs again, so I can get my music on a HDD, because of drive failure could be considere a nuisance... There just is no way to delete this kind of data by accident and even if you do delete them by accident, there are countless number of programs you can use to get the data back. HDD failure on the other hand, makes it much harder and expensive to recover 30Gb of photos for example.
Depends on how valuable your data is. I'd take 2 x 74GB over 1 x 150GB using a OS based software RAID 1 for my workstation.
I wouldn't, just because 2x 74gb raptors are noisier, more expensive and slower.
But that's just me. Everyone has to assess his or her own risk scenario.
Exactly.
spolitta wrote:why 3x sp2504c? the P120 250GB series is a lot noisier than the P120 160Gb (I own 3 250gb and 2 160gb) and the P120 160GB is noisier than the P80 160Gb SATA. so why did you choose the noisiest Samsung HD and want to compare it with such a different hard drive like the raptor 150gb, i dont know.
Because SP2504C is pretty quiet drive according to SPCR, my friend has 2 of them and they sound pretty similar compared to the SP1614N I own. 3x 250gb is only 45$ more expensive then 3x160, price/gb. I have already explained why I put them against each other.
Let me be honest I don’t really understand your situation but if I were you I would borrow another 80 bucks and buy the raptor and a P80 Samsung 160gb; just to be on the fast and quiet side of the game.
I currently have only 160gb of storage. I could very easily live with the raptor. What's the 80 bucks for?I already own a P80 160gb as can be seen on my sig, not that I would need to borrow money in the first place.

I think I will list some of the sources where I have gathered my information. Just in case I have used a direct quote without realising it.

www.acnc.com , I like the pictures here.
www.pcguide.com
Wikipedia
TomsHardware's test on software raid-5.
RAID-5 On The Desktop - Hardware vs. Onboard Compared from http://www.gamepc.com/

On some forums, I have seen some small real world tests like RAR compression or extraction on raptor vs 3x 250gb drives. And the raptor was clearly faster. How ever it wasn't even onboard controller. What I would be interested to see is 3x 250gb drives doing some RAR tests, compared to a single 250gb drive or two 250gb drives where it is done from a disk to disk. So the other drive does only focus on reading and the other writing. Too bad it's impossible to find a onboard controller test where they compare the write performance of an array against a single drive, because that is the weakest link of RAID 5.

I'm not interested in discrete RAID 5 controller performance, because for me the major attraction in RAID 5, is the fact that it is cheap and it has a much smaller data overhead then RAID 1, because it can be done with purely software (no costs), or with onboard controllers that we have already paid for on the purchase of motherboards. One of the reasons that RAID 5 has become so popular is the fact it is cheap. So let's forget the discrete controllers.

spolitta
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Re: 3x Samsung sp2504c vs WD raptor 150gb

Post by spolitta » Wed Feb 15, 2006 8:22 am

Because SP2504C is pretty quiet drive according to SPCR, my friend has 2 of them and they sound pretty similar compared to the SP1614N I own. 3x 250gb is only 45$ more expensive then 3x160, price/gb. I have already explained why I put them against each other.
Forget about the reviews, those good samples get selected by the manufacture before being shipped to SPCR, like I said I’ve owned two 250Gb and one 200gb and all were by far louder than the two 160gb I have.
Last edited by spolitta on Wed Feb 15, 2006 8:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: 3x Samsung sp2504c vs WD raptor 150gb

Post by spolitta » Wed Feb 15, 2006 8:24 am

repost.

Erssa
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Re: 3x Samsung sp2504c vs WD raptor 150gb

Post by Erssa » Wed Feb 15, 2006 8:35 am

spolitta wrote:Forget about the reviews, those good samples get selected by the manufacture before being shipped to SPCR, like I said I’ve owned two 250Gb and one 200gb and all were by far louder than the two 160gb I have.
I'd like to see you prove this conspiracy theory. Forget the reviews :roll:, yeah right...

jasonb885
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Re: 3x Samsung sp2504c vs WD raptor 150gb

Post by jasonb885 » Fri Feb 17, 2006 8:38 am

Erssa wrote: ...
jasonb885 wrote:Do you mean FRAID (fake BIOS/software RAID)? You'd be better off with real software RAID or a true hardware RAID controller with the logic right on the controller. FRAID is the worst of both worlds in terms of recovery, portability, and performance.
I meant onboard raid-5, like the one provided by Sil3114, some nf4 chipsets etc... I had no idea how vague I was when I said "RAID 5 controller on motherboard". I'll try to be more clear next time.

Yes, that's generally FRAID. If there are only Windows drivers that's usually a good indication that it's FRAID. Or just Google.
Erssa wrote:...
As you can clearly, see I never claimed RAID 5 does any mirroring. I said it basically has the benefits of mirroring, which to me is; data that can sustain the loss of a hard drive. No I didn't mean RAID 0+1, RAID 10 or anything other. I know the principle of how RAID 5 works.
But when talking about RAID levels, RAID 5 does _not_ mirror. From a user perspective, you can claim it's sorta kinda like having a mirror of your data, but, it's not in every technical sense of the definition of RAID 5.

I just don't want people walking away with the idea that RAID 5 actually does _mirroring_ of your data. It does not. It does stripping with parity.
Erssa wrote:...
Especially on writes and especially with onboard controller. The array might perform poorer then a single Samsung and will definaltely perform worse then a single 150 raptor, no questions asked.
Well, it isn't really an on-board controller in most instances anyway. It's just a 'dumb' ATA controller with most of the logic in the OS driver itself.
Erssa wrote:...
No I don't need backups for that. I trust myself, but I don't trust the hardware. I never delete anything by accident, especially, if it's important. Even, if I would, I could live with myself for it. However losing all the photos I have from the last 5 years, because a drive fails, would be pretty "annoying" or having to rip hundreds of CDs again, so I can get my music on a HDD, because of drive failure could be considere a nuisance... There just is no way to delete this kind of data by accident and even if you do delete them by accident, there are countless number of programs you can use to get the data back. HDD failure on the other hand, makes it much harder and expensive to recover 30Gb of photos for example.
That's right. Don't trust the hardware. You trust your RAID 5/1/1+0 whatever to save you from severe hardware failure? Dude, seriously, backup to an external device or media, too.

I've been through several disk failures just in the past month. I haven't lost any data thanks to backups, but merely running RAID isn't enough to save you from the failure of multiple disks. And, yes, stuff sometimes happens to even those of us who never make mistakes, ever. Once in a great while even I delete something by accident, although it's rare.
Erssa wrote:...
I wouldn't, just because 2x 74gb raptors are noisier, more expensive and slower.
I'd contest that insofar as for data reads, the mirror pair with a decent hardware RAID controller in RAID 1 would pull you ahead for reads. You can read two independent files at a time on a good controller, though writes will surely suffer versus a single disk.
Erssa wrote:...
I'm not interested in discrete RAID 5 controller performance, because for me the major attraction in RAID 5, is the fact that it is cheap and it has a much smaller data overhead then RAID 1, because it can be done with purely software (no costs), or with onboard controllers that we have already paid for on the purchase of motherboards. One of the reasons that RAID 5 has become so popular is the fact it is cheap. So let's forget the discrete controllers.
There is a cost to FRAID. Poorly implemented drivers can lead to data loss. I trust proprietary drivers even less than I trust my hardware. You've just paid for marketing in most cases with FRAID. There is no hardware RAID controller on-board, just some new BIOS options.

Additionally, you lose out on things like portability and recoverability with FRAID, since you can't necessarily put any remaining disk from your RAID 5 array if you lose the mainboard in some other mainboard and expect to be able to read your data. Further, if that mainboard goes away and you can't buy a replacement, how do you read your data now?

Screwed.

Stick to either software RAID in the OS or true hardware RAID. FRAID is just a gimmick.

Shining Arcanine
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Re: 3x Samsung sp2504c vs WD raptor 150gb

Post by Shining Arcanine » Fri Feb 17, 2006 10:00 am

Erssa wrote:
Shining Arcanine wrote:Only at sequential reads. All other reads are slow as the heads are not aligned.
Nope. Read performance is _always_ good, even if it is random read performance. The parity data blocks aren't read on data reads. So the read performance is basically just like reading on a purely striped array. Actually RAID 5 is faster on random reads then it is on sequential reads.
I never said it would not be. I did say that it will not be significantly faster though.
Erssa wrote:
Shining Arcanine wrote:People at SPCR try to minimize their PC's noise output so that means only one drive. Chances are you will be hard pressed to find anyone here running a RAID-5 array.
Yes, that is true in most cases, but in some cases people need certain things e.g many hard drives, but they can still make them as quiet as possible.
One hard drive is typically quieter than three hard drives.

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