Re: RAID versus 10,000 rpm?

John Doe wrote:

> If I buy two 5400 or 7200 rpm hard disks, could they be used as the
> main hard disk storage (for booting Windows XP Home) and be
> configured to operate faster than one 10,000 rpm hard disk, on the
> following mainboard?
>
> http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=K7N2_Delta2-LSR
>
> Integrated SATA Phy, supporting up to 2 ports
> One SATA controller, supporting two drives in master mode
>
> NV RAID (Software)
> Supports 2 serial ATA plus 4 ATA 133 Drives
> RAID 0, 1, 0+1, JBOD is supported
> Booting from RAID
> Cross controller RAID support
> Rebuilding on the Fly
> Spare Disk Allocation
> Supports Windows 2000 and later versions
>
> Thank you.

It seems to be Don Rickles Appreciation Day on the newsgroup--you ask a
perfectly reasonable question and get a bunch of smartass replies by people
who only meet half that description.

Now, in answer to your question, the answer is "maybe but probably not".

Sequential transfer rate can be higher for the lower RPM disks if you get
disks with higher areal density--7200 RPM drives seem to lead in that area.

The problem is that you seldom get sustained sequential transfers, and when
access time becomes a factor the higher RPM drive, with its lower latency,
generally will be the better performer.

RAID can gain you significant performance benefits _if_ your data patterns
are such as to benefit from its use--generally speaking they aren't.

If you only have two drives in the machine, you'd do better to use one for
Windows and put the pagefile on the other. If boot time is the issue then
use standby or hibernate instead of shutting down.

--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)
.

Relevant Pages

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