Is Sparsing better than one good hard drive

[huskerfan91]

I bought the WD raptor 74GB 10,000 rpm hard drive but my friend, who works at best buy keeps telling me that i should buy two 120GB WD hard drives at 7,200 rpm and sparse them together because it will be faster. Which will be better, faster?

 

[jurgen36]

What do you mean by sparsing???? Never heard that term. If you mean raid 1 you will have almost twice the drive speed. But you do need two, preferable identical drives.
Regards

Jurgen

 

[attrofy]

It depends on your application as well. For heavy disk read/writes, the RAID 1 option will be better, but most gaming and other "non-continual" data reading apps do better with a single, faster, higher cached drive. RAID 1 options do best for heavy data transfer - like movie editing. It hink the term your friend is refering to is "Striping" - that is where part of the data is written to each drive. This also increases your risk factor for data loss. The likelihood of a single drive crashing is possible, now you are in a situation where one of two drives might fail, and bring down your entire system. With RAID 1 there is no redundancy, and a better option is RAID 0+1 (or 10) but this requires 4 hard drives. You also end up with half the capacity of what you are paying for.

If you want an increase in HDD performance, get the newer WD 150Gb 10,000 rpm drive with 16mb cache (Raptor). That will give better performance then your current one, and better then most RAID setups for *most* applications you are likely to encounter.

 

[huskerfan91]

So what would be the best hard drive to get or set up to do to run high graphics games and not have problems or have to worry about problems

 

[Freestone]

Just to set things straight, striping with no redundancy is RAID 0. RAID 1 is mirroring, where one drive is the exact copy (mirror) of the other.

RAID 0 gives you speed and access to all drives capacity, but if one drive goes bad, you lose all data. RAID 1 gives you access to only one drives capacity, so in a typical installation where two drives are used, you lose 50 percent capacity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks#History

 

[wahnula]

For the most speed: RAID 0 writes to both drives simultaneously and is the fastest choice. It is also doubles the chance of hard drive failure, so be advised.

One scenario would put those two 74 GB drives in a RAID 0 array, then get two humongous drives (like the 750 GB Barracuda) in a RAID 1 array. Then backup the RAID 0 arrray to the RAID 1 array and put all your files on the RAID 1 array, you'll be set...for a while!

Tony

 

[wahnula]

Here's a great guide to RAID, it even explains those weird RAID 2,3, & 4 levels as well as the more common ones:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/index.htm

 

[attrofy]

Sorry, I did mis-speak - fingers working faster then the brain...again...RAID 0 is what I was meaning, and writting RAID 1.

Huskerfan,
If you feel you must have faster then what you currently own, go with the new WD Raptor 16 mb gache drive, forget the RAID, and get a large HDD for data storage and backup. Although the 750GB is a good reccomendation, it may be overkill for the cost per GB, as there are some good 300-500gb HDD for a better cost/gb ratio. You could buy two smaller drives that will yield higher total storage capacity for almost half the price of the single 750gb drive. In all honesty, your 74gb drive is going to be plenty for gaming applications. The only potential draw back is that you will have to put your OS and your games on the same physical drive to get the performance gains. IF it becomes *that* critical, a second 74gb WD drive would probably be the best cost/performance gain (for storage options). If money isn't an issue, buy the 150gb raptor, use that for all your high end games, install the OS on the 74gb (on maybe a 25gb partition), and buy a 400+gb HDD for storage.