640GB RAID0 vs 300gb Velociraptor

[sboerup]

I've done a lot of research a while back about the 640gb 6400aaks (blue line, black is a smudgen faster) and the 300gb Veloci.

I first purchased a Velociraptor back when it was $300 and didn't think it was worth it and was happy with the 640gb. That was before I got my Mac Pro and realized it's worth spending some money (and back when I didn't have a lot of extra spending cash). I might have answered the questions myself, but I had to see if any other users have tried this:

I recently did a RAID0 of (2) 6400aaks drives, and currently getting 210mb/s+ on both read and write. Now, this is my boot+apps drive only. Honestly, I really couldn't tell a difference from my previous setup as a single 6400aaks drive as boot.

Since the RAID0 is taking up 2 HD slots I wouldn't mind freeing up a slot if the 300gb Velociraptor will be as fast or faster. I know it maxes out around 115mb/s, but the seek time is going to be much better. Considering I don't need hugely fast read/write times, will I notice a difference or will it be negligible?

[twig16]

in absolute terms:

AAKS X 2 in RAID 0 is faster
than the Velociraptor which is faster
than the AAKS alone

But, since you couldn't tell the difference between the RAID 0 pair and the single AAKS to begin with, can't you tell here that the Velociraptor is not worth your time and money for this application?

I know you are drawing a distinction between read/write and seek, so it is not a totally empty question.... but really....

[vicentk]

I had been try 6400AAKS and 6401AALS, both speed is nearly.

Left is 4*6400AAKS in OSX software raid0
Right is 4*6401AALS is same setting

After I use few months, AAKS is not better in IO, AALS is better in IO. As you can see AALS had dual IO so it make more stable.

[Nik]

The point is that the speed of the Raid0 does not decline as fast as it does on the raptor drive.
I will configure my new mac pro with not two but three 640GB Western Digital Caviar Blue drives plus a 2TB TimeMachine Drive.

I will partition the four drives as follows:

3x640GB Raid 0: 1787GB formatted space:
Scratch for Photoshop: 87 GB
Macintosh HD: 1700 GB

1x2TB: 1865GB formatted space:
Windows: 115 GB
Movies & TV Shows: 250 GB
Time Machine: 1500 GB

The Time Machine is smaller than the Macintosh HD. Since I will not use all the 1.7 Terabyte it does not matter.
As soon as I hit the wall I will outsource the Movies & TV Shows and get 250gigs of extra space.

[Horst]

3x640GB Raid 0: 1787GB formatted space:
Scratch for Photoshop: 87 GB
Macintosh HD: 1700 GB


To the best of my knowledge, the whole point of a Scratch disk is that it's on a dedicated HDD, not on a partition of the same physical drive/Raid array as the system/apps drive.

As for the OP, I played around with 2x WD Black 640GB in Raid0 vs. a Velociraptor as boot drive.

The VR is slower, but keep in mind that there isn't much Read/Write going on on your system drive, if you keep your data elsewhere, and program/OS boot times are not of any importance re. performance .

So now I use the faster Raid0 for a Scratch partition and a 2nd partition for big files I'm working with, the VR as system/app drive.

Storage and backups are on external FW drives.