What is the big difference? I know Raptors are faster but theres like 74 gigs on them!! Are you supposed to only install games on them or what? Im lost.. SSD's are just too expensive for me so Im not really worried about that...
Raptors are 10,000rpm drives. Very costly to produce with high storage capacity, so as such as more expensive. The peak data transfer rate they provide is good, but no longer as amazing as it was when they first came out. The current Raptor generation is much better than the last, the Velociraptor. It is average for noise, rather than amazingly loud like the older drives were, and is available up to a 300GB size. The main advantage to owning a Raptor is excellent response time, which makes an OS run MUCH better. Game loading time won't be much different. SSDs have an even better response time (Eco HDD 17ms, 7200rpm HDD 13ms, Raptor 5-7ms, SSD 0.5ms) and transfer rate (Old HDD 50MB/s, Eco HDD 80MB/s, 7200rpm HDD 100MB/s, Raptor 90-140MB/s, SSD 70MB/s write 150MB/s read for the old ones, 150MB/s write, 250MB/s read for the new ones), and of course, use a fraction of the power and make no noise.
Of course, you can get a SAS drive in 15,000RPM for about the same price as a raptor...and SAS RAID cards are the same price as SATA RAID cards.
As far as SSD's go a good drive will destroy HDD's with it's latency and it's inputs/outputs per second. There are plenty of SSD benchmarks out there as they are getting more and more popular. I'm eagerly waiting for the day I can get a decent size from a decent maker for a decent price, but I still do fine by my 7400 RPM HDD's. Generally with the faster, smaller disks you install your OS and primary applications on the fast drive, and have a 2nd large HDD where you store your space-hungry files such as movies, music etc...
So you keep telling people, even though they cost an absolute fortune, because they're proper RAID cards.
Question... What exactly is RAID in a nutshell? I got the basic concept of using multiple HDDs as one big disk to increase speed but how exactly does that work?
RAID = Redundant Array of Independent Disks. ". . . the basic concept of using multiple HDDs as one big disk to increase speed " is RAID 0 (striping) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks will start you off. Nutshell = If you have data across multiple drives that can be accessed simultaneously, but can retrieve the data faster. Analogy Single drive. You have a well and a bucket. You need to get two buckets of water. The well can only serve one person at a time. You (individually) have to make two trips to get two buckets of water. RAID 0 = Two wells, two buckets and two people. Both people can be getting a bucket of water at the same time, and can get the 2 buckets of water in one trip instead of the two it would take you individually. There are variations of RAID that use striping and mirroring to provide speed and data protection.
So running 2 500gb 7200RPM HDDs in RAID 0 would be faster and more effective than 1 1TB 7200RPM HDD in just about every way?(excluding power consumption) Also, im noticing RAID is mainly for servers, would that be neccesary for a Home pc used mainly for gaming?
Faster in terms of data rate, but no faster in terms of access latency, which is really what defines how fast a system is. In fact, it will be slightly worse than one drive in that regard.
Time to clear something up: Onboard RAID is junk, as are software RAID cards. When I say "SATA raid cards are the same price as SAS RAID cards" I am not talking about software RAID, as I don't even consider it to be RAID. If you care about hard drive speed, you are not going to use a software-based card or an onboard port to connect even a single drive. Even in JBOD mode, drives are faster (lower response times) on a hardware RAID card than on a mainboard port. Plus the hardware RAID card cuts CPU & RAM use. Note: you can see from my signature that I am using software RAID at the moment. This is because my old 6-port CERC hardware RAID card does not support my newer drives, and I am saving the money for a good 8-port 3-ware unit (although I am now considering a 4-port with a port multiplier to save a few $). My system is an econo-box; it uses a Phenom-1...not an I7, and I do not have the money for 15K SAS drives or 10K Raptors.
Whooooaaaa.... I'll just stick with regular 7200RPM drives in regular non-RAID mode....lol Thanks for the info on all this, good to know Im not missing alot with raid cause its kinda..."Complicated".... Hopefully Ill learn about all this out when I got to college next year...(still in high school) =P
It's not complicated (unless you try to wrap your brain around RAID 60). Goto wikipedia and search for RAID...the article lays everything out so that any 8-year-old (or 80-year-old) can understand it. Then do a search for SAS if you are still interested in the subject. One day your hard drive will die, and you will loose your data. On that day, you will wish you had RAID.
Either way though, you don't need to use RAID just because you bought a controller with RAID on it, be it in a motherboard, or in a PCI / PCI Express slot. However, to get ANY SAS ports in a PC, you HAVE to buy an expensive controller, typically a RAID card. That renders SAS prohibitively expensive, which is why it isn't used for desktops. Overall, agreed, redundant arrays are very useful, but dear god, they can also be a REAL pain in the proverbial to get and keep working.
