Hard disk manufacturer recommendations for Raid setup

[Arris]

I've just recently changed motherboard to the GA-7VAXP with Promise ultra ATA133 raid controller on it and fancy trying out a mirrored raid setup. At the moment I have a 20Gb Maxtor drive thats been fine for a few years and a Quantum Fireball 10Gb. I'm putting the smaller disk into a second system and selling it. With the profits I'm looking at buying a couple of ATA133 driver, probably between 30 and 60gb. Anyone have any recommendations of which disks to use. Access times, cache sizes etc? Looking to spend about £50-70 per drive if possible...
The only online ones I have found which are ATA133 are Maxtor but the system admin at my work says that he has read about compatibility problems with Maxtor drives and Promise Raid controllers. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

 

[Arris]

Ended up opting for the Seagate Barracuda IV 7200 40gb drives

 

[Phantasm66]

choose your stripe size wisely, its made a very big difference in tests i've done....

I made a post here:
https://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1596

And the article I thought was important was here:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1491&p=5

You should find your controller and its recommended stripe size there, and its a worthwhile article to read before creating a stripe.

If you do the stripe properly, its a wonderful thing.

 

[Phantasm66]

Can I ask, do you really want to make a mirror? I mean, you will get no performance improvement, only redundacy.... Do you really have gigabytes and gigabytes of data to protect? Would your backup needs not more likely be served with a proper CD-RW backup scheme or a cheap tape drive?

What I am trying to say is that the performance improvements of a RAID 0 setup are pretty cool and with RAID 1 you will be getting none of that... Only redundancy... Do you really need that redundancy so much that you will be forgoing the opportunity to build a nice, fast RAID 0 setup? Your read access will just be the same as one single 7,200 RPM drive with RAID 1 but with RAID 0 and 2 drives it will be closer to 14,000 RPM!!!!!!;!!!!! I know which one I would go for if it was for a home computer, unless as I said you have like gigabytes of important data at home... do you???

Oh, and you are right to look at identify hard drive models, its the way to go for a RAID setup. It would of course work on different models/brands, different sizes (although you are limited to an array based on the smallest disk's size) but its far cooler and better to have similar model HDDs in your array.

 

[Th3M1ghtyD8]

I've heard those Western Digital Special Edition drives with the 8mb caches make nice raid drives

 

[Arris]

Originally posted by Th3M1ghtyD8
I've heard those Western Digital Special Edition drives with the 8mb caches make nice raid drives

Yeah.. I know. I was tempted, but I'm not running a server so 2 x 80gb WD Special edition drives at £130 each seemed a bit overkill considering the 2 seagates cost me £140 in total (even though it gives me 2 40gb drives... I didn't really need that much space)

 

[Arris]

Originally posted by Phantasm66
Can I ask, do you really want to make a mirror? I mean, you will get no performance improvement, only redundacy.... Do you really have gigabytes and gigabytes of data to protect? Would your backup needs not more likely be served with a proper CD-RW backup scheme or a cheap tape drive?

Well I was wrong in what I wanted to do. I realised this before I read this post (after reading my motherboards Promise controller manual). Stripe is what I will be doing. I'll be checking out those other threads related to RAID that you posted Phant

 

[LNCPapa]

It's kinda hard to resist though Arris - check out MY REAL results on a WD 120 Gig Special Edition. I can only imagine having this baby set up RAID 0. In the words of the immortal Homer Simpson, "Hmmmmmm... RAID"

LNCPapa