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Need new OS/App drive(s) for my desktop, what would you get?

What to do

  • Single Vanilla Drive

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • 3-4 Standard drives 'short stroked' + Raid0

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Velociraptor

    Votes: 1 100.0%

  • Single 60-80gb SSD

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • 2-3 smaller SSD's + Raid0

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Other

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    1
Picklz

Picklz

SUDO Make me a SAMCH
I put this here to try and keep this on topic and free from shenanigans, so lets try and stick to that :)

The HDD in my Desktop/Gaming machine took a dump over the weekend so I need to replace it. I do a wide variety of things with this machine, rip/encode music and video, play various games, photo/video editing, etc. Capacity needs to be 60-80gb+ but I have a file server so huge drives aren't necessarily needed.

Now to address this before it even comes up, yes some of these have raid0 in them, yes I know that provides no redundancy and increases failure chances, yes I'm willing to take that risk for the increased performance since anything I would be concerned about loosing is either backed up or is stored off-box to begin with, yes I have run raid0 before and if setup properly it's noticeably faster. If you don't like the raid0 option don't vote for them.

Alright so the options I'm considering in order from cheapest to most expensive

1) Single 500gb-1tb Replacement drive, likely the slowest option too

2) 3-4 250-500gb drives in a raid0 setup for short stroking (only using the first 30-50gb or so of each drive to improve performance)

3) Single WD Velociraptor 300gb 10,000RPM drive

4) Single 60-80GB SSD

5) 2-3 30gb SSD's in Raid0

6) other

What would you do and why?
 
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Big Nate

Big Nate

Chaos Engineer
SSD are good but I am not sure if they are as good as people make them out to be.

I would go with the Velociraptor.

Plus SSD x3= $$$$$$
 
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Workdawg

Workdawg

NARWHAL
You double posted Nate, and apparently I can't delete it ... <.<

Anyways, there are plenty of benchmarks out there showing that SSDs are as good as people say.
 
Big Nate

Big Nate

Chaos Engineer
Well I still don't like them.

SSD need to prove the fact that they can last. then I will hope on board.

What double post??
 
Z

Z-licious

Guest
SSD all the way. The majority of drive operations are random read/write. Random read/write is where the SSD really shines.



It's hard to read here but the velociraptor scored a 0.68MB/s. That's thanks to a little achilles heel of HDs called latency.




Notice how the velociraptor is not shown here. He had to leave it off the chart since it threw the whole thing off. The velociraptor was 17.3 ms.



Random write speeds are pretty damn impressive as well.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3607&p=4

It's true that SSDs have limited life spans. They say the average user will get 3-4 years out of one. But by that time, you should be upgrading anyway. 3-4 years is an eternity for hardware. Especially up-and-coming hardware like the SSDs.
 
Picklz

Picklz

SUDO Make me a SAMCH
MC's website said they had 2 in stock so I ordered them for in store pickup, we'll see if they ACTUALLY have them lol.
 
Z

Z-licious

Guest
You're gonna love em. SSD is so much faster for random read/write it's a whole nother level. For sequential read/write they are faster, but still on the same order of magnitude.
 
Picklz

Picklz

SUDO Make me a SAMCH
Well it turns out Microcenter's online inventory is off and they don't actually have any of the Vertex 30gb SSD's in stock, hard to believe right?

So I decided to go with a single 60gb SSD instead (OCZ Vertex still) they are rated slightly higher than than the 30gb version for throughput, I'll rock that for a few months till I purchase Retail Windows 7 and need to do a reinstall then probably add a second one and swap over to a raid setup.
 
Z

Z-licious

Guest
Matt, you're gonna love it. I have the sister drive, the OCZ Summit 60 GB and it's magical.
 
Picklz

Picklz

SUDO Make me a SAMCH
I'll post more once I've had a chance to do more on the PC, but I picked up the 60gb SSD on my way home from work. Got home and slapped it in and powered up the PC w/ Win7 RC 64bit, 13 minutes later I was sitting at the desktop, windows installed, no joke lol. All I've done other than that is download some drivers and wait for a few apps to install, so far though it seems snappy to say the least.

Edit:

Press restart, in under 1 minute I was able to post in the chatbox again, that's pretty rad.
 
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