wut would b faster? 2 20gb 2mb cache 7200rpm ata/66 hdd's in raid or a single 80gb 8mb cache 7200rpm ata/100 hdd

single drive would be faster due to being ata 100....

Quote: Originally posted by ducati748r single drive would be faster due to being ata 100....

If the drives themselves could keep up then yes, but in practice even the best drives can't deliver more than 40-50MB/s sustained, so I'd put my money on the RAID. But the 8MB buffer would probably make it close.

Some good relevant articles at Tom's Hardware:

Using RAID (Has test results, RAID 0 array vs. drive w/8MB buffer)

Review of a WD with an 8MB buffer (explains about ATA ratings vs. actual performance.)

I find Tom's claims that it outperforms SCSI drives laughable at best.
8.9 ms seek time?
umm...my 15k cheetah has a 3.6 ms seek time and my IBM 10k ultrastar has a 5.4ms seek time

I dont even want to get into MTBF rates between SCSI and IDE

if you want credibl;e hardware information, steer clear of tomshardware, go somewhere where they dont get paid for good reviews.

well its not all about seek times, its the transfer and all that other **** that counts....

If you really want to i can post some hard SCSI transfer numbers that will make ANY IDE look like a red headed step child, even the much vaunted serial ATA pales in comparison.

The point is, Tom doesnt know his arse from a hole in the grond.. he compares a top of the line IDE drive with a seriously gimped SCSI drive and then makes a headline based on a lopsided analysis so his sponsors will like him

What's fast? Putzing about the internet, playing most games, word processing and spread sheets. The single ATA100 drive with the big cache, fast access times and good burst rate would seem faster. But open a gigabyte size photoshop file written on the outer 60% of the HD platter, and start to work on it and the raid seems much faster. Slow loading programs like Illustrator and large games and the raid will seem faster even at 66.

At home I use a single ATA100 drive. The quietest I could find at the time I bought it. Unreal Tournament takes awhile to load, but what the hey it's economical. And it's quiet! Not the fastest, but good enough.

Where I work I can bring even the most powerful super maximum mondo extra l337 ultra 320 scsi or fiber channel stripped raid to it's knees.

All a matter of perspective.

yeah sure, there will always be tasks that hardware is playing catchup to accomplish, my point was that Tomshardware is not exactly the most accurate hardware review site.

You gonna tell me that IDE is better than SCSI? toms was trying to in his article about that 120 gigger with the 8 meg cache, from a purely monetary value perspective however, that may very well be true, IDE is definitely more bang for the buck, but there is no denying that SCSI is faster and longer lasting than IDE.

Actually I was posting in response to the original question. Not your follow up. I'd never say IDE is better than SCSI. But at close to $1000 dollars for a 73 gig ultra 360 or fiber channel vs. $100 dollars for a 80 gig IDE 100 it's not hard to see why a reviewer would be impressed with the benchmarks of the western digital drive. High MTBF or not, SCSI is just not cost effective anymore in all but the graphics and server market.

Don't expect me to jump on the "trash tom's" bandwagon. I just don't see it. Colored or not by the reviewers exuberance, the facts are there for the consumer to make his own decision. Plenty of Tom's advertisers come out on the bottom end in their reviews. If you want to trash a review site that does falsify and load reviews with misinformation and statistic juggling, I can think of much better candidates. Anyone remember a certain review site that said their main advertiser's thermal paste was better than AS3? Contrary to every other site on the net?

No, Tom's doesn't always do it just right. But when your the biggest you're also the biggest target. They still do a helluva lot better job than 99 percent of the sites out there. At least when they review something, they actually compare it to something else. The numbers are repeatable and varifiable. They have to be or they wouldn't still be around.

plink plink...my two cents

Too Put it in n00b language

Dollor for dollor IDE out performs SCSI, of course there are some application where the performance of the the latter is required but for most average Joes like you and me IDE drives are more than adequete for everything we do

actually fiber channel can be done quite cheaply if you hit ebay, you wouldnt believe how cheap FC drives have gotten now!

I wont argue with you about Tom's, its just how I see it. i can cite at least a couple instances where he flat out lied but I dont want to derail this topic any further than I already have.

I'm with you on the IDE thing, I primarily use IDE, but dont discount older SCSI drives, I put together an Intel SRCU21 Ultra2 Raid with 3 10k IBM ultrastar 9.1 gigs in a striped array for about 100 dollars with some selective shopping. granted thats 27 gigs compared to 80 gigs of ide, but when im playing everquest, my zone (load) times are phenomenonly faster. at least twice as fast if not 3 times, and you can always use ide in your rig for file storage.

but if you are in need for large storage you are pretty much limited to IDE. If I could get 120 gig scsi drives to put in a raid 0 or 4 to use a 0+1 then I would run scsi. But I am sure if they were available then It would run sever thousand dollars. Thats why I use IDE raid.

well then... that wuz a learning experience for me, yet i'm still undecided, basically windows would boot from thr raid drives and my games would run off the 80gb, right now the 80gb is partitioned.. partition 1 is 10gb and the other is 70gb, i use the 10gb for windows and the other for games