Fastest drive set-up???

[fbieler47]

From all the posts I have read on hard drives and performance, it seems that I should have at least four 2.5", 40GB drives@15,000R.P.M. RAID 10, formatted into small partitions, the 2.5" drive makes a smaller physical travel of the heads, increasing speed, the striping to speed up access to the data and mirroring to cover me if I have errors. Smaller partitions make the heads travel shorter distances, and the formatting starts on the outer edge of the disk, where the speed is greatest, so the data can be retrieved and stored fastest there. OR am I all wrong and read all the info wrong? Help me please, I wish I had read all the information before I spec'd this computer, oh well c'est la vie.I can always trade one of my friends for a couple of my old drives, and maybe get some cash to buy little fast ones if that is what I need to do. Any Ideas??

 

[SNGX1275]

As far as I know, 2.5" 15000rpm hard drives aren't available yet. There are supposed to be available later this year. They are also going to be SCSI drives rather than the more familiar SATA or IDE drives. You might be better off with the larger physical (and capacity) WD Raptor drives and setting them up in a RAID configuration.

 

[Nodsu]

From all the posts I have read on hard drives and performance, it seems that I should have at least four 2.5", 40GB drives@15,000R.P.M. RAID 10, formatted into small partitions

As SNGX said, there are no such drives available. And the fastest storage device I know of, is the i-RAM thing from Gigabyte (uses battery-backed RAM modules for storage). You should get a true hardware RAID controller too. The integrated fakeraid crap in motherboards is slow and hogs your CPU.

Smaller partitions make the heads travel shorter distances, and the formatting starts on the outer edge of the disk, where the speed is greatest, so the data can be retrieved and stored fastest there.

This is true only for the first small partition you have. With small partitions you simply prioritise your data - stuff on the first partition will be fast, stuff on the last partition will be dead slow. And if you are using Windows, you have to consider all the hassle with lots of drive letters.

 

[fbieler47]

I priced out a set of four SAS drives, They were about $2800 for four. LOL I think I'll buy a dozen at that price. Oh well, just have to wait for technology to become more affordable in my quest for speed.SCSI's always were expensive and although I had quite a few SCSI's in the past, now I kinda like serial ATA, Don't have to worry about which one gets the terminator, What the LUN is, Just plug it in. They are projecting data transfer rates of over 12GB/S by 2010, Guess I can wait, by then I might be able to make it three quarters of the way through FEAR without getting killed lol
Thanks for the input, gives me more to think about, and it's always good to have a little bit of knowledge before I jump off the cliff.