I would avoid a Raid 0 setup for a speed increase. It will shorten the life of the drives (which are of lower quality today) and run the risk of data loss.

Overall, the drives have not kept up with the faster processing technology of today's systems. Matched up with yesterdays systems the hard drives of 15 years ago were faster than today's in terms of their effect on overall system speed. Today they are the single largest bottleneck in a system. The hard drive manufacturers have missed the boat in that respect trading capacity for performance.

That said I would recommend spending the money on a Western Digital Raptor for your OS and programs. The model I would recommend is the WD740ADFD 74GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive. It is very fast and you should make sure you get the most recent ones (check the date) as they are much quieter due to a bearing change. Avoid Newegg. They have an agreement with Western Digital to buy up their old stock on a regular basis. Thus the rebates.

In terms of video storage I don't think it will make much difference in terms of EIDE or SATA. I would get whichever your system is geared toward. Most today are geared toward SATA with an lame JMicron IDE controller to run EIDE devices. A bigger concern would be reliability as you have discovered. Currently there is NO brand that is reliable. One used to be able to point the finger at Maxtor or some early IBM drives and praise Seagate or Western Digital. That is no longer the case. In fact Maxtor and Seagate have merged.

Your best bet would be to look at Newegg or Amazon user reviews for each and every specific model you may be interested in and see how many complaints of drive failure are listed. ONE is too many for me. Many drives are failing within weeks or even minutes today.

And again make sure you get QUIET drives. That way you will be able to tell if (and more likely when) they are starting to go because they will usually start making noise at which time you can retrieve your data before it is too late.

I would also recommend active cooling for your hard drives especially after checking them for heat output during extended usage (leave the cover off to check this) and remember - You must back up your valuable data on a regular basis.

John

John...

I agree with much of what you said. I'm running a raptor drive for my OS/boot drive. However, I question your information on reliability. I've been running the same dual drive RAID set for two years with no problems. I agree tho', that when one uses RAID0, one MUST backup every file whenever it's catastrophic to loose what's there.

How would running a drive in RAID configuration shorten the life? I'm afraid I don't see the logic in that statement.

How would running a drive in RAID configuration shorten the life? I'm afraid I don't see the logic in that statement.
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From Wikipedia although there are many other sources:

RAID 0 failure rate
Although RAID 0 was not specified in the original RAID paper, an idealized implementation of RAID 0 would split I/O operations into equal-sized blocks and spread them evenly across two disks. RAID 0 implementations with more than two disks are also possible, though the group reliability decreases with member size.

Reliability of a given RAID 0 set is equal to the average reliability of each disk divided by the number of disks in the set:


That is, reliability (as measured by mean time to failure (MTTF) or mean time between failures (MTBF) is roughly inversely proportional to the number of members — so a set of two disks is roughly half as reliable as a single disk (in other words, the probability of a failure is roughly proportional to the number of members. If there were a probability of 5% that the disk would die within three years, in a two disk array, that probability would be upped to 1 − (1 − 0.05)2 = 0.0975 = 9.75%). The reason for this is that the file system is distributed across all disks. When a drive fails the file system cannot cope with such a large loss of data and coherency since the data is "striped" across all drives (the data cannot be recovered with the missing disk). Data can be recovered using special tools (see data recovery), however, this data will be incomplete and most likely corrupt, and recovery of drive data is very costly and not guaranteed. In the RAID-5 setup reliability is sought by mirroring the disk for emergency backups.

John

Currently there is NO brand that is reliable. One used to be able to point the finger at Maxtor or some early IBM drives and praise Seagate or Western Digital. That is no longer the case. In fact Maxtor and Seagate have merged.

Google has published their in-house statistics from very large numbers of drives. They found no problems related to heat, contrary to what has been believed in the past.

They did find very significant differences in failure rates between brands, although they were careful to only refer to them as Brand A, B, C, etc.

Another recent study I'll pull later did mention brands, WD was best by a good margin.

Maxtor may have merged with Seagate, but this doesn't mean that the Maxtor factory immediately changes its standards...

RAID is frequently misunderstood, and best avoided if possible, especially with cheap controllers (i.e. motherboard ditto).

Gotta love those Raptors, and the fact that they still do well.

Thanks for a the replies so far; I've already learned a lot....
I did manage to find a site that had done a test for performance of RAID (0) vs. EIDE on my very same mobo. Basically, they found the throughput with the RAID was barely faster than the EIDE configuration; so it's not worth it for me to make the change.

Other question though: How quiet is the Raptor drive? I couldn't find any decibel level in the specs. I gotta give it to Seagate; their drives are QUIET. At 10,000 RPM, I'm afraid the Raptor would be a screamer (i.e., audible whine), and I wouldn't be able to live with that.

(My old Maxtor drives sounded like jet turbines as they spun up to speed, all 5400 RPM!!!)

Other question though: How quiet is the Raptor drive? I couldn't find any decibel level in the specs. I gotta give it to Seagate; their drives are QUIET. At 10,000 RPM, I'm afraid the Raptor would be a screamer (i.e., audible whine), and I wouldn't be able to live with that.
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As I said, the most recent ones have a new bearing design and are noticeably quieter. The problem is that unless you look at the drive first, you won't know what the date is.

I would still recommend the Raptor, but since they are relatively expensive you will probably be tempted to look for the lowest price. That is where you will run into a problem. Newegg should be avoided at all costs for WD hard drives. As I said, according to some hot deals sites Newegg has an agreement with Western Digital to buy thier old stock and offer rebates as an incentive to buy.
One of the lifetime members on the AnandTech forum ordered a Raptor from Newegg and when it arrived the date was March of 2006. He returned it and went to Best Buy and the date was January 2007. He had a coupon for Best Buy, but he still paid more. His drive was quiet.
For the lowest price where you can still look at the date I would suggest you go to a computer show so you can look at the date before you buy it.

John

What that says is that the 2-disk array as a whole has double the chance of failing. Remember, if one member fails the whole array fails. You're left with one good disk full of unusable files.

Or more literally, the array has half the life expectancy of the two disks that comprise the array.

Back up those files.

But back to SATA vs IDE. Even without RAID, I'd just start adopting SATA drives. Newer motherboards are starting to abandon PATA so if you think you might want to use these drives in the future on an upgraded system you should be buying SATA. SATA also has the possibility of hot swapping (although I find that it only works if I attach the SATA drive after the system boots. If the system booted with the drive attached it's likely to be treated as permanent).

Rob Mack

There's a new article over at Toms Hardware comparing SATA vs Raptors. They focus on RAID and price. Their take on it is that, for the price, 2 SATA disks in a RAID0 array are much more attractive than the Raptors.

The up side of the Raptors is that they are very fast and more robust than a 2-disk array. It's a much simpler solution, but it's a lot more money. Take note that there's no RAID configuration needed.

Either configuation should allow you to play back uncompressed SD footage at full framerate.

With onboard RAID controllers, I keep hearing that Intel's integrated RAID is MUCH faster than NVIDIA's.

I'm confused about why you would even consider PATA drives if you could use SATA. Are you thinking that SATA=RAID? It doesn't. You can run a single SATA drive just like a single PATA drive, and it'll work in future systems too.

Rob Mack

Either configuation should allow you to play back uncompressed SD footage at full framerate.

Yeah, but if you're going to EDIT uncompressed SD with a couple of tracks, you need a RAID.

That's what I've been doing with a bunch of Raptors since 2004, works great and less fattening.

Yes, an array of Raptors is faster than an array of lesser disks. And if you've got lots of uncompressed source footage then an array is the way to go.

Not many people here will be editing uncompressed but even so it makes lots of sense to render titles and graphics as uncompressed.

Rob Mack

Seriously, if you're interested in speed for multiple tracks, the ONLY way to go is fibre-channel. The cost of the lesser systems is approaching fiber anyway. Might as well spring for the best.

Can you provide a link?

Can you provide a link?
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Fibre Channel and SCSI Hard Drives

John

Fiber channel info:
http://www.iol.unh.edu/services/testing/fc/training/tutorials/fc_tutorial.php

Fiber channel comes in several flavors, 1Gbit, 2Gbit, 4Gbit, communicates over ethernet-like connections, and interfaces with your PC via PCIe-x4. 4Gbit fiber channel will perform I/O at 300 MB/sec.

One fiber channel vendor:
http://www.qlogic.com/products/fc_san.asp

Actually, I guess I was looking for the cost comparisons. We have fiberchannel here but I didn't pay the bill. My impression was that part of the motivation was that you could have long data runs, which makes fiber a good choice for several suites, which was what we needed.

There's a difference between arrays for single workstations and arrays for multiple workstations in how you move the data around. I'd imagine many users here are in the single station camp, or maybe need a small portable disk or array that can be shared between a dektop and laptop.

Bob's IDX arrays with GBe aggregation look interesting, and also look like good hobby projects for Linux users (a smaller system could be home grown)

Rob Mack

A recent article entitled Disk drive failures 15 times what vendors say, study says.......Drive vendors declined to be interviewed seems to bear out my observations regarding hard drives not being as reliable overall as they once were.

" Customers are replacing disk drives at rates far higher than those suggested by the estimated mean time to failure (MTTF) supplied by drive vendors, according to a study of about 100,000 drives conducted by Carnegie Mellon University.....................

........The study, presented last month at the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies in San Jose, also shows no evidence that Fibre Channel (FC) drives are any more reliable than less expensive but slower performing Serial ATA (SATA) drives.........

........At the same conference, another study of more than 100,000 drives in data centers run by Google Inc. indicated that temperature seems to have little effect on drive reliability, even as vendors and customers struggle to keep temperature down in their tightly packed data centers. Together, the results show how little information customers have to predict the reliability of disk drives in actual operating conditions and how to choose among various drive types............


.........While a general reputation for increased reliability (as well as higher performance) is one of the reasons FC drives cost as much as four times more per gigabyte than SATA, "We had no evidence that SATA drives are less reliable than the SCSI or Fibre Channel drives," said Gibson. "I am not suggesting the drive vendors misrepresented anything," he said, adding that other variables such as workloads or environmental conditions might account for the similar reliability finding............

John

Interesting.

I didn't even realize the drives themselves could have Fibrechannel interfaces. We're using an array of SATA discs and the array itself has the fibre interface.


Rob

Newegg should be avoided at all costs for WD hard drives. As I said, according to some hot deals sites Newegg has an agreement with Western Digital to buy their old stock and offer rebates as an incentive to buy.

I don't understand why "old stock" should be avoided. This is especially true since you say, elsewhere in this thread, that WD used to build more reliable drives. Wouldn't I therefore WANT the older stuff?

Are you saying that drives age if they are stored for a year or so before they are installed? I didn't know that.

Are you implying that "old stock" is refurbished stock? That would be a different thing, but I think refurbished stock has to be identified as such.

So, I am confused by why Newegg should be avoided. I want to make a point of this because I buy many of my drives on closeouts and recommend that most of my clients do the same. I have never sees any downside to this practice, so if I am missing something, I'd sure like to know about it.

So, I am confused by why Newegg should be avoided. I want to make a point of this because I buy many of my drives on closeouts and recommend that most of my clients do the same. I have never sees any downside to this practice, so if I am missing something, I'd sure like to know about it.
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I didn't say that Newegg should be avoided period. I said "Newegg should be avoided at all costs for WD hard drives"
I order a lot of things from Newegg and am generally happy with them. I just don't order Western Digital hard drives from them. And by "older drives" being more reliable I wasn't talking about six months ago. I was talking about several years ago. But my point about "old stock" does in fact refer to several months old and here is why that is important.

Recent Example: Late 4th Q. Western Digital changed the bearings on some of their more expensive drives like the Enterprise Raptors 74GB and 150GB. They are now much quieter. Newegg sells them cheaper than many others because of the Western Digital rebate offered to them by WD to get rid of "old" stock.
When you order a Raptor from Newegg you will get a Sept. 2006 drive or earlier instead of a Jan. 2007 drive (which will be quieter). Some people have gotten year old drives which reduces the warranty period. That is part of the agreement with WD and thus the rebates for Newegg only. It has been explained several times on Anand Tech Hot Deals over the years. I actually explained this above.

John

If one were to take the specs alone, SATA should be slightly faster than IDE. Especially when one considers the SATA 300 drives.

Here is a link to a white paper done by Carnegie Mellon Unviersity that discusses the failure rates of various drives. They were trying to evaluate the stated MTBF (MTTF) to real world situations.

First, customers and vendors might not always agree on the definition of when a drive is ``faulty''. The fact that a disk was replaced implies that it failed some (possibly customer specific) health test. When a health test is conservative, it might lead to replacing a drive that the vendor tests would find to be healthy

Granted that it is not riveting but I found it interesting.