[QUESTION] SSD primary - 5400 vs 7200 for secondary?

[theeldest]

Hey Everyone,

I'm speccing out a new build and I'm looking for some advice (from experience) on the secondary hard drive. I'll be using an SSD for the boot drive (120GB Vertex3) and will use a couple drives in RAID1 for the data drive.

What is the overall performance impact of having 5400 rpm drives vs 7200 rpm drives for the Data drives?

Thanks!

 

[yogurt_21]

Hey Everyone,

I'm speccing out a new build and I'm looking for some advice (from experience) on the secondary hard drive. I'll be using an SSD for the boot drive (120GB Vertex3) and will use a couple drives in RAID1 for the data drive.

What is the overall performance impact of having 5400 rpm drives vs 7200 rpm drives for the Data drives?

Thanks!

depends on the drive, thiugh I will say any 1-2 platter 64mb cache drive is going to be decently fast even at 5400 rpm.

 

[theeldest]

Probably should have listed the drives I'm considering:

5400 RPM:
Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cac...

7200 RPM:
Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB
Western Digital Caviar Black WD2002FAEX 2TB 7200 R...

Obviously with the high areal densities we can maintain pretty high sequential read throughput on low rpm drives but latency & IOPS suffers.

Anecdotally, how much of a difference will I *notice* using the slow drives as data drives? I'd imagine it shouldn't be much because games and programs will sit on the SSD. Documents, movies, photos, etc will be on data. Accessing those will probably be pretty good as it'll be sequential.

Is anyone running an SSD with a 5400rpm data drive? experiences?

 

[cadaveca]

I am running corsair F60, and a Seagate 2TB SATA3 5900RPM drive. The Seagate gives really good numbers.

That's a single drive, I don't really see any need for RAID.

 

[theeldest]

Awesome. Thanks!

Regarding RAID, I've gotten pretty anal about backing stuff up. My wife and I worked out in yellowstone for a summer and kept all of our pictures on a laptop backed up to an external hard drive. Both failed. 5k pictures that we'll never take again.

So RAID1 in the desktop and everything backing up to a NAS and the good photos uploaded to a 'cloud' photo site. Any important documents also get e-mailed to both of us (tax returns, etc).

Like I said, anal and probably overboard, but I won't lose important data again. Especially since a second 2TB drive only adds $80 to the total (budget is about $1200).


Thanks again!

 

[cadaveca]

RAID1 for redundancy is a good idea. I have no love for RAID0, though, been kinda trying to get people off of it, to be honest, simply becuase the data loss can be so catastrophic.

Sounds like you feel tha same way, so I think you are good to go. Just make sure to get SATA3 64MB drives, not SATA2, and you'll get some pretty good performance as well.

Of course, you will need a board or controller that supports SATA3(sometimes refered to as SATA 6Gbps)

 

[theeldest]

I'm waiting for the Bulldozer release but I'll be choosing between an AMD 990FX or SandyBridge. (fingers crossed that AMD comes out with something great). So either way it'll be 6Gbps.

I ran a couple 250GB drives in RAID0 a while back and one day the system decided it didn't like that. Took a few hours but I got the array back. Backed up and haven't run RAID0 since.

Now all I need to do is get my system off the wireless as the primary internet/network connection. Full backups to the NAS take forever.

 

[araditus]

If I might make a slightly off topic response here mr. eldest.

I get the feeling from you that keeping certain files safe is very important to you, hence the raid 1 and nas backup.

I didn't know if you were aware of this but if there are any critcal files you dont use often (like pictures or divorce papers ) you should probably but them on writable dvd's or bluray as they are not mechanical means of storage and you can put them in a fireproof safe.

I say this becuase I do it myself, any files that I actually care about are on a dvd in a safe, if lightning struck right now I wouldnt care.

Hope this helps. oh and on topic, I would choose the spinpoint f4, for somereason even at 5400rpm they certainly scream in performance, and since seagate just bought them (the hdd division of samsung) the f4s are going to be the last of truely samsung product, which are fabulous for reliablilty.