Hard Drive Help

jealous57 · Post by **jealous57** » Sat May 21, 2011 8:08 am

hello all!
I have looked every where and cannot find satisfying answers for what I am looking for! So here goes!

I am currently running (2) 150gb raptors (one is a windowed "X" model, for age refference) in raid 0 for my games drive. I am looking to replace them. I am considering either (2) 640gb WD Caviar Blacks (64mb cache) in raid 0, or a single Caviar Black (dual processor dual head).

My questions are. I think that the single drive may perform near what I currently have... right or wrong given the age of the raptors?

I know the raid 0 set up with the 640s will be faster than the single drive but how much faster real world?

As this is strictly a games drive, I am really not super concerned with the "instability" of raid 0, but is not having TLER a huge deal in raid 0?

Any input greatly appreciated!
Thanks for the help!

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat May 21, 2011 10:12 am

Very likely a single Caviar black would be at least as fast.

I would look at the benchmarks in reviews of the single Caviar Black and run the same benchmark on your own array.

You might also look at the price of a single Velociraptor. That's what I'm using for my games drive.

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Sat May 21, 2011 1:50 pm

Yeah, IMO, the black series isn't worth the money. Grab a velociraptor if you need some speed. The 300gb ones are going pretty cheap now a days.

jealous57 · Post by **jealous57** » Sat May 21, 2011 4:25 pm

I was initially looking at the velociraptors.. However the main reason I want to swap out the drives is more capacity. I have ~300gb with the current array. I am really looking to up it and still maintain comparable or better speed. 2 vraptors in raid 0 is tempting but more than I really wanna spend. Which is why I mentioned the 640s raid 0 or 2 tb.

The only real reason I even settled on a black series is I currently have a 1tb black... and have had horrible luck with seagate drives. Hitachi burned me on a 15K scsi drive back when they bought out IBM so... I swore them off! lol

Keep it coming!!! Thanks again!

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Sat May 21, 2011 9:33 pm

You may consider my current favorite HERE. The speed may only be 5400rpm, but since it has such massive density & 32mb cache, it actually beats many 7200rpm drives.

VidmanII · Post by **VidmanII** » Sun May 22, 2011 9:24 am

One of these...
http://www.excaliberpc.com/592588/vante ... i-300.html

Two of these.....
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148701

in RAID 0. Or just get an SSD and call it a day.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sun May 22, 2011 10:13 am

Many of the 1Tb drives - even if they're 5400 RPM - are much faster than older drives because of the density and modern buffers.