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4 WD VRaptors What now?

1K views 26 replies 10 participants last post by  silvergoat 
#1 ·
So I recently purchased (2) 500GB WD VRaptors during the newegg blackfriday sale and during the Xmas sale I purchased me (2) 250GB WD VRators spent like $300 total which is a steal! So now I'm all excited, but not sure what to do next..I was originally just gonna buy 1 of the 500 GB but couldn't resist the price and got another one..($120 savings each). Of course even with that savings after buying two I still felt like I was missing out on savings (That itch to buy more) but any more didn't fit the budget at the time...Xmas came around and I was still itching after seeing the transfer speeds of those drives compared to my 3 year old seagates and newegg did it again...but with the 250's, Soooo I got 2 more...

Now my original plan consisted of just 1 drive but now I have 4, So I was thinking I would Raid 0 the (2) 500GB drives and make a Ultra fast 1000 GB volume for just my games which currently have filled up a 750 GB HDD to the brink of explosion...The 750 GB drive is currently host to about 500+ GB in PC Games and another 200+ GB in ISO's for Emulators. Several of the PC games are heavily modded so one of the main reasons for the requirement of the speed of the drives is for High res Textures/LOD's Farther vision distance rendering ectt...Now my question here is when setting up Raid 0 in this situation what stripe size should I pick?

As for the 250 GB Drives I was also originally planning to get just 1 but I guess everything comes in pairs huh? So I was originally gonna replace my current 250GB drive with one of these 10K Drives. But I was thinking why not Raid 0 the 2 drives and make an even faster boot drive and separate the 2 drives into (2) 250 GB volumes. 1 Volume would be for the OS and the other would be for most likely programs that I want to be able to launch fast (Blender, Photoshop, Media Programs like that), I don't want to dedicate all 500 GB to just the OS drive that's for sure. Now would it be better to run the 2 drives separately or get the speed boost of the 2 drives together in Raid 0?

I keep very few of my documents on my OS Drive (mostly just freshly downloaded files or freshly written stuff) I keep most of it on my Media drive or Game Drive (all games go straight to the game drive) so if the OS gets corrupted I don't have to sweat it so much..I also have a 3TB backup I picked up on black Friday too that I am now using to backup my important stuff. I currently have all important OS files (Game saves, Program settings ect) media and gaming drives backed up on it. The 750 GB will most likely get retired to a backup drive as well.

What do you guys think I should do, How should I set this up? I will be using the Onboard raid controller from my Sig Rig Mobo, don't have funds currently to pickup a raid card and don't have the Mobo space either way..
 
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#2 ·
Soz bro could you shorten that? How many drives?

2 x 500

2 x 250 etc

TLDR
redface.gif


You heard of SSDs? Photoshop? Blender etc? Not sure if srs. Mirror the drives that are the same size for failover, use them for storage. Get a SSD. Incremental backups to the 3TB external wouldn't be a bad idea either, schedule them.

Reinstall os? Make a disk image of your SSD every.....meh, it takes how long to reinstall from a USB3? 10...15 minutes?
 
#3 ·
Look @ post #5
wink.gif
 
#4 ·
SSD's aren't worth it to me out of my price range for performance/Storage. Only reason I got these was because I got them for cheap. For the price I would pay for 1 512 GB SSD I got 1.5 TB of space at 10K RPM's You have to remember I'm coming from 3 year old drives. So I'm not used to things opening fast or if they do open the window quickly it takes a second before It can be interacted with...
 
#5 ·
#6 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by dekciW View Post

SSD's aren't worth it to me out of my price range for performance/Storage. Only reason I got these was because I got them for cheap. For the price I would pay for 1 512 GB SSD I got 1.5 TB of space at 10K RPM's
For the price you paid, you could have gotten 8TB+ 7200RPM HDDs which perform about the same or better than 1.5TB 10K HDDs....
 
#8 ·
As I stated earlier I'm not interested in spending money on a SSD performance/storage is to expensive and the reason I got (2) 500 GB's was because I need a place to store my games and I could raid them for more performance since I couldn't beat the price I figured might as well... a single 512 ssd wont do that job, 2 would but that is already twice of what I spent total for 4 drives, and I still don't even have a new OS drive, (which I've read mixed information about using for OS drives anyways, because of life expectancy's based off all the data going around on the OS drive)....I also was looking to upgrade my OS drive so I got 1 250gb and decided to grab one more in case I liked the performance of the 500 GB's in raid. If not I have other uses for it its not a big deal...

As for 8+ TB's I don't need that kind of space, So larger drives never even crossed my mind since I already had nearly 5 TB of space as it was not including the new drives, All I was thinking was performance and price. I'm not sure where you see drives that would outperform the Raptors in performance for the price I paid, I'm guessing your thinking about the Seagate 3TB Barracuda XT (3 Platter) drives but those still don't out perform the Raptors in anything but storage space, from what I've seen. Considering I don't need all that space and got 2 Raptors for the price of 1 of those and can raid them to be even faster I don't see the issue since I was after performance not storage in the first place.

Either way I'm not here to argue about how I spent my money or didn't spend it I'm here because I have questions on how to get the most performance of what I did spend my money on. Thank you drBlahMan for the info, do you have any suggestions on whether or not I should raid the OS drives or not I seemed to have read mixed opinions on the matter but haven't seen any real facts.

Also I'm curious in reference to the stripe size what is typically considered a large file? I know ISO's fall under the category, but what is the minimum size for a file to fall into the category?

EDIT** It takes me a lot longer to do reinstall's because I have a lot of programs I use for mod development and every time I reinstall I need to reconfigure them reinstall scripts, resources, reconfigure windows ect because not everything carries over with the settings backup or its just not worth it to hunt down where they hide the settings. I don't use any image files because the whole reason I am doing a reinstall is because I want a fresh install of everything to get rid of everything I don't need or use that I've installed over time...And there's just something about the spunkyness of a fresh install, that isnt cluttered with old drivers and registry entries that aren't always deleted...I could make an image of the fresh install but I never get a chance to fully install everything I want every time I reinstall so I don't even bother because I normally run out of time and then the whole install just ends up getting neglected because I want to use my computer not just go around reinstalling everything.
 
#9 ·
Yeah, he's probably talking about the Seagate 7200.14 3TB's - they are crazy fast for 7200RPM, especially when nearly empty.

128K stripe is what I'd use. Current drives have enough sequential performance to handle a stripe that large just fine.

I hope to see some Velociraptor RAID-0 benchmarks.
smile.gif
 
#10 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieHo View Post

For the price you paid, you could have gotten 8TB+ 7200RPM HDDs which perform about the same or better than 1.5TB 10K HDDs....
Seek speeds for the OS. Not only do the Raptors spin faster, the platters are physically smaller.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD
 
#11 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dirtyworks View Post

Seek speeds for the OS. Not only do the Raptors spin faster, the platters are physically smaller.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD
Smaller platters are a bad thing for performance. The outer edge of a 1 TB 3.5" HDD platter is probably close or better
 
#12 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieHo View Post

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dirtyworks View Post

Seek speeds for the OS. Not only do the Raptors spin faster, the platters are physically smaller.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD
Smaller platters are a bad thing for performance. The outer edge of a 1 TB 3.5" HDD platter is probably close or better
I'd say close. The access times don't drop as much as you'd expect, but sequential speeds should be comparable to a modern Velociraptor.

hdtuneproahcireadbenchm.png

hdtuneproahcireadrandom.png
 
#13 ·
Smaller is worse for seek performance? I understand it would hinder sequential transfer speeds, but wouldn't the outer edge of a 10k 2.5" platter be a better spot for an OS than the outer edge of a 3.5" 7200 drive? Less real estate for the head to move is what I'm thinking.
 
#14 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dirtyworks View Post

Smaller is worse for seek performance? I understand it would hinder sequential transfer speeds, but wouldn't the outer edge of a 10k 2.5" platter be a better spot for an OS than the outer edge of a 3.5" 7200 drive? Less real estate for the head to move is what I'm thinking.
Some of those characteristics actually work against each other. An idea Velociraptor design would be 3.5" and 10k RPM, but short-stroked
Quote:
Higher Platter Density
+Increases sequential performance
+Allows larger capacity drives that can cut access times when you utilize less of them. (Short stroking)
-May require the manufacturer to tune the drive to have conservative seeks (especially when working with new densities)

Higher density drives are usually rolled out in "Green" models first.
Quote:
Higher RPM
+Increases sequential performance
+Decreases access time
Quote:
Larger Platter Size
+Increases sequential performance towards the outer edge
-Increases whole-drive access times, as they fall toward the inner edge
What we currently have is a 2.5" Velociraptor, which has these aspects:
Quote:
Platter Density: Sequential Performance+++
RPM: Sequential Performance+++, Access Times---
Platter Size: Sequential Performance---, Access Times---
Of course, access times dropping are a good thing - but the small platter size actually works against the platter density and RPM when it comes to sequential speeds, and short stroking a 10k RPM drive with 3.5" platters should allow the same access times of the 2.5" model.

Regarding the internals of a drive, physically speaking a few millimetres of movement are a few millimetres of movement - that movement should take the same amount of time when the drive's controller is tuned the same way, and is dealing with the same density of platter. (Which does not necessarily have to be the same size of platter.) Regardless of whether the platter is 2.5 inches across or 3.5 inches across, the drive should be able to deliver the same access times because the other characteristics match up. But there's no way for the smaller platter with a smaller circumference to match the larger one in sequential performance, because literally more data is passing under the head per second for the larger platter.
 
#17 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by dekciW View Post

So still 2 questions should i raid the os? And if so what stripe size should i use for the os? Largest common file size moved would be probably about 500 mb although i do love me my udk, which is about 1.2 gb avg
I probably wouldn't - but then again, I do enough stuff with my computer to merit all the drives in my signature.
tongue.gif
When doing that many things at once, having each drive have its own IOPS (rather than combining them with RAID-0) is best.

64K or 128K for OS, on an array built from modern drives.
 
#18 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dirtyworks View Post

Smaller is worse for seek performance? I understand it would hinder sequential transfer speeds, but wouldn't the outer edge of a 10k 2.5" platter be a better spot for an OS than the outer edge of a 3.5" 7200 drive? Less real estate for the head to move is what I'm thinking.
I don't know the exact platter radius but lets assume 2.5" and 3.5".

The RPMs and size of the platter determine the linear velocity at the edge:
7200RPM 2.5" HDD's: 7200 * 2 * pi * 2.5/2 = 54977 in/minute = 53 mph
7200RPM 3.5" HDD's: 7200 * 2 * pi * 3.5/2 = 79168 in/minute = 75 mph
10K RPM 2.5" HDD's: 10000 * 2 * pi * 2.5/2 = 78540 in/minute = 75 mph
15K RPM 2.5" HDD's: 15000 * 2 * pi * 2.5/2 = 117810 in/minute = 112 mph

This is regardless of the aeral density.
 
#19 ·
So I got around to running some HD Tune and here's the results..I also ran it with my old drive to get an idea on the difference in speed...So for starters I guess I will post those first since I ran into something interesting...The testing I did with both the WD running as the OS and the Seagate. So there are 2 sets of results and I also ran the 500GB Raptor just for fun..

I'm not sure if their current usage capacities make a difference in these tests, but if they do I will post up the usage should anyone say. Also the Seagate is an old windows install while the raptor is fresh so this can play a difference as well. I will be doing the raid setup at a later time when I find the time and will post results then...

So here are the seagate results with the Raptor as the OS Drive.


Now here It is run as the OS Drive... Any ideas as to the cause of that large drop in minimums?


Here are the results of the raptor drives pretty consistent through all the tests...

As the OS Drive


As secondary drive


500GB on raptor OS drive
 
#21 ·
Sickening access times on those raptors! Every time I see a new Raptor screenshot their access times are lower. When they came out reviews pegged them at 7-7.2ms... now I see screenshots of ones that are approaching 6ms.
redface.gif
I have a bit of envy. That would make an awesome games drive.

Hey - try going into HDTune's Options and raising the block size to ~512KB. I'm curious what results you get after doing that.
smile.gif
 
#22 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kramy View Post

Sickening access times on those raptors! Every time I see a new Raptor screenshot their access times are lower. When they came out reviews pegged them at 7-7.2ms... now I see screenshots of ones that are approaching 6ms.
redface.gif
I have a bit of envy. That would make an awesome games drive.

Hey - try going into HDTune's Options and raising the block size to ~512KB. I'm curious what results you get after doing that.
smile.gif
here you go

 
#24 ·
Quote:
i don't know if this helps, but here is my 3x Vraps in raid 0. i just got the third when it went on sale at fry's. got it for less then $80US after a coupon i had for 10% off.
Funny that you mention that. I just picked up two 600GB raptors from Frys here in Vegas for $89 a piece on Wednesday.
 
#25 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cotton View Post

Funny that you mention that. I just picked up two 600GB raptors from Frys here in Vegas for $89 a piece on Wednesday.
yep, thats the same store i got mine. i had a coupon for another 10%. i would have gotten two more, but i thought there has to be a limit to my overkill at some point.
 
#26 ·
So trying to run the 250 gb's in raid and it wont let me install on the raid array. Ive tried removing all the drives except the 2 in the raid array, rebuilding it multiple times, and even overriding the boot menu to boot from the raid array instead of the dvd drive for the completing installation part. no matter what i do the install goes correctly until the final reset where it says completeing install then it shows the cannot configure hardware for windows error. The raid is recognized everytime windows just doesnt want to complete the install. Im not sure what to try now...ideas?
 
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