Argh... western digital :(

[Imperil]

Raptor is clicking like a madman.... time for an RMA. I've owned 5 Western Digital drives over the course of my life.... I've had 5 dead Western Digital drives over the course of my life....

I wish somebody would make something that competes against a Raptor that isn't an expensive SAS drive.

[Archangelus]

I just use Seagate. I've had about equal luck with them as I have w/ WD.

[Imperil]

I love Seagates, we have about 4-5 of them right now and they are great.. haven't actually had one die yet. I just wish Seagate had a 10k RPM drive that could compete with the Raptor... the drive speed actually makes a big difference when compiling/building due to link times having heavy disk activity.

[Archangelus]

Yeah, I didn't take that factor in when you mentioned the Raptor.....

[PinkRabi]

Couldnt you just use the new raid system with 9 drives where it writes 1bit onto 8 of the drives for each bit and the 9th just contains info on what bits on wot drive? Heard they are pritty fast, though im not particularly techie, so this is just things i have sort of "heard", so i could be completely wrong lol.

[XoR]

RAID with 9 drives? Never heard of that one. There's a point of diminishing return.

Your basic RAIDS are :

RAID 0 = 2 disked striped together for maximum speed (gamers choice) but if 1 drive dies, the whole volume fails and you're screwed. (have a good backup policy in place!)
RAID 1 = 2 disks mirrored together as 1 volume for maximum protection. If 1 drive dies, smile and replace it with no data loss or downtime. Slower I/O.

There is RAID 5 and 1+0/0+1, but these are for server setups. They are 3+ drives.

I have 2x500GB SATA2 Seagates in RAID 0 and although they are not Raptor speed, they are very fast for $140 drives. Just Spinrite them to make sure they are solid.

[PinkRabi]

well maybe not 9. but as in a factor of 8, plus 1. so could have 5 drives. That way apparently it is really fast, and if one drive goes you do not lose everything

[Archangelus]

That's RAID 5 where you can have three drives and you stripe the data across the three (or more) drives and if one fails, the other two can rebuild the array using the still functioning drives (assuming you have at least two still working and not a simultaneous failure).

Imperil's issue is more about speed (10k) drives vs. capacity or redundancy (7200k drives in a RAID config).

-Arch

[Imperil]

When I order the new system I am seriously contemplating doing a RAID Mirror on two 15,000rpm SAS drives... although I'm not really sure if the benefits outweight the cost. Costwise you have to add the hardware RAID card for $640 and then each drive is $450 for a 300GB drive.. so it adds about $1200 to the cost of the system.. even without RAID you're looking at roughly a thousand bucks for a single SAS drive (you need the RAID card to support SAS). I may actually forego adding those options and instead buy a Raptor for that system... they just seem to have reliability issues.

[Thowarr]

I'm going to do a RAID 69 when I get home. It will access info in 2 secs, but then it'll crash and need at least a half hour to boot back up again.

[Ayyyla]

[Undead_Mercenary]

/facepalm

[Archangelus]

That smilie says it all.....