which would be a faster hard drive setup?

option A
single seagate SATA 32 mb cache 500gb

option b
two seagate sata 16mb cache 250gb (stripped)

the cost between the two is nearly the same (give or take 10 bucks) I would think the stripped set is faster by a fair amount , but unless it is pretty noticable i would prefer the simplisity of one drive.

what are the experts thoughts.

PS i know a stripped set is less secure, but i have a single 250 gb ATA i am using for "storage" and it will be backed up, i am refering only for use for the main install drive for os and programs only.

2008-01-23T11:42:53Z

the raid configuration would be controled from a on board raid controller.

2008-01-23T11:55:02Z

o.k. all "data" such as music files ect, would be sotred on the 3rd dirve which is a old ata drive and that would be backed up. i am just curious about the difference in performance for a "boot disk" i mean what information would i losse if all important data is on a seperate drive?

2008-01-23T11:55:46Z

also isn't 2x250 gb in a strip set, just as big as a single 500gb?

Anonymous2008-01-23T11:47:17Z

Favorite Answer

Option B would give a small preformance boost but not much however using the strip set would be more risky because this has no fault tolerance. If something goes wrong with one drive then you lose everything whereas with the single drive you have some measure of recovery (place in another system to recovery data).

Your best bet is to go with Option A. Unless your going to go RAID 5 then it is not worth it to do RAID 0.

10

w0osht2008-01-23T11:44:25Z

RAID-0 (striped) is always going to be faster. BE SURE TO KEEP DAILY BACKUPS.. Lots of valuable data has been lost to RAID-0 arrays in the past.

If it were my system, I would opt for the 500gb drive (more room to expand in the future for not a whole lot of performance loss)

00

Larry B2008-01-23T12:59:11Z

To answer your additional details, if you are going to only have programs and the OS on the RAID0 then that is all you stand to lose if a drive fails.

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