wd raptor 10k sata drives for g5

[revisionA]

Any reason why I cant pop a pair of 10k raptors from Western Digital into my g5 single 1.8 revision A monster?

Would the 30% faster rpm really mean 30% faster computer response too?

This is a 400 dollar upgrade if I buy them as a pair.

It shouldnt matter what drives you use as long as they are sata right?

Scott

 

[SpaceMagic]

Also like to know this. Have the same model G5. Yes yes i know it's been asked a million times but its so confusing.

1) Can you RAID the two drives (RAID 0)
2) Can you boot from raided drives

 

[broken_keyboard]

Yes, you can raid them and boot from the raid.

It was only pre-10.3 that couldn't boot from raid (I believe).

 

[Ikstej24]

Yes you can put them in, and you will see a significant speed increase. If you need more than 150 gig of hard drive space, I recommend using one 74 gig Raptor drive as a boot drive and then something like the Maxtor Maxline III as a storage drive.

See barefeats.com for their recent test on SATA drives.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Couple of things:

There are only room for 2 hard drives in a G5 tower (barring expensive and/or b#tt-ugly mods), so by installing 2 x 74 Gb Raptors, you'll drop your total space to about 140 Gb.

The idea of using the 10,000 RPM drive as a boot drive/scratch drive and separating your data to a different drive is good, and has been confirmed here by a number of members here who use this in a production environment.

However, there is not a 1:1 performance increase. Your drive access will be faster, in some cases, by up to 30% but by a lower % on average. It will not change all of the rest of the functions of the machine, so your real-world performance increase may be a few % but nowhere near 30%.
Analogy: if I get a Ferrari capable of 160 MPH, will I get through downtown faster? Perhaps a bit, but the traffic and red lights have a much greater effect on your commute time than the theoretical speed you can attain between stoplights.

The concept however of using a RAID 0 (striped) array for a boot volume isn't very robust. First, your risk of data loss is multiplied, because any failure on any one drive will take out all data on both drives (that's how RAID 0 works).

Second, setting up a RAID involves a CPU overhead while the distribution of the data is calculated. The net result is that a RAID 0 system does not benefit typical desktop use, and is actually slower in many types of operations. RAID shows a speed gain only under heavy, sustained use such as on a multi-user server or in capturing large video files.

http://www.storagereview.com/php/cms/cms.php?loc=news_content&id=970&start=6&range=10 for more information.

From Anandtech.com: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=2101 "If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop."

You would be better off with a Raptor as the boot drive, and one of the latest generation of 250 - 400 Gb SATA drives, like a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 (which is the same mechanism as a MaxLine III) with 16 Mb cache or the latest Seagate or Hitachi 7K400, for your data.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

 

[SpaceMagic]

Couple of things:

There are only room for 2 hard drives in a G5 tower (barring expensive and/or b#tt-ugly mods), so by installing 2 x 74 Gb Raptors, you'll drop your total space to about 140 Gb.

The idea of using the 10,000 RPM drive as a boot drive/scratch drive and separating your data to a different drive is good, and has been confirmed here by a number of members here who use this in a production environment.

The concept however of using a RAID 0 (striped) array for a boot volume isn't very robust. First, your risk of data loss is multiplied, because any failure on any one drive will take out all data on both drives (that's how RAID 0 works).

Second, setting up a RAID involves a CPU overhead while the distribution of the data is calculated. The net result is that a RAID 0 system does not benefit typical desktop use, and is actually slower in many types of operations. RAID shows a speed gain only under heavy, sustained use such as on a multi-user server or in capturing large video files.

http://www.storagereview.com/php/cms/cms.php?loc=news_content&id=970&start=6&range=10 for more information.

From Anandtech.com: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=2101 "If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop."

You would be better off with a Raptor as the boot drive, and one of the latest generation of 250 - 400 Gb SATA drives, like a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 (which is the same mechanism as a MaxLine III) with 16 Mb cache or the latest Seagate or Hitachi 7K400, for your data.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

As always CanadaRAM, a perfect reply. Thank you.