Best use of Disk drives for speed?

[Akula971]

Hello everyone. I have 2008 MacPro with 4 drives in it. My Primary drive is a WD raptor 300GB, with a 700GB Seegate drive as a time machine drive. i also have another Raptor with Vista 64 ultimate on it for games. The last drive in there is a 700GB Samsung HD753LJ which is just used for general storage.

My questions are:-
1. Will it make any difference in speed if the applications are on the primary drive (raptor) or the Samsung drive?
2. Would I gain if I put the two Raptors in a software raid 0, and used the time machine drive as its back up? or is a software raid not that good?

I use my Mac for Home Video work, websites, and all the usual.

Thank you

 

[DoFoT9]

1. the raptor will be the fastest
2. none at all, the two drives work in parallel so whats the use apart from data security.

 

[Cromulent]

2. none at all, the two drives work in parallel so whats the use apart from data security.

That is completely incorrect. RAID 0 theoretically doubles the hard drive speed as it stripes data across both drives. Obviously in real world use you won't see 2x the performance, but it will certainly be faster than one.

Software RAID 0 will be slower than hardware RAID 0, so if you are looking for maximum possible speed get the RAID card.

 

[DoFoT9]

That is completely incorrect. RAID 0 theoretically doubles the hard drive speed as it stripes data across both drives. Obviously in real world use you won't see 2x the performance, but it will certainly be faster than one.

Software RAID 0 will be slower than hardware RAID 0, so if you are looking for maximum possible speed get the RAID card.

hhmmm.. i thought RAID 0 was a mirror.. or is that RAID1??

and no, it wont be double the performance, just look at single core CPUs compared to Dual Core CPUs.

EDIT: ok i got it now, RAID0 = add storage together, RAID1 = mirrored.

 

[Horst]

Obviously in real world use you won't see 2x the performance, but it will certainly be faster than one.

Software RAID 0 will be slower than hardware RAID 0, so if you are looking for maximum possible speed get the RAID card.

Leopard's Software Raid0 is in most comparisons nearly as fast, in some instances faster than hardware Raid0 (depending on Raid card), according to barefeats and amug .

It also almost doubles my write/read speeds in GeekBench and Xbench (2 drives), fwiw.

At least in a MacPro with Leopard, SW Raid0 is well implemented and seriously fast .
If the speed benefits the apps one uses/ one's workflow is a different matter.