After a month on my laptop, I've finally decided to fix my dead PC. After all, it isn't a wise idea to carry on my write-ups on the laptop, because I've grown reliant on LyX/LaTeX word processing and my laptop has no space for that.Anyway, my RAID array died on me for the nth time. I suspected it was one of the SATA connectors at first, but they proved to be fine after some troubleshooting. Now I'm quite sure it's just one of the two hard disks that's permanently dead, but (in simple terms) the problem with a RAID0/striping setup is that the two hard disks act as a single one, so you really can't figure out which one has the problem unless you try one by one. And I don't have that much time.
So, now I have to pay a visit to the distributor and claim my replacement. They come with 5 year warranties... nice, but I realized that I've lost the purchase receipt! ~S$500 down the drain =/
3 quick rants about warranties:
- Stupid conditions requiring purchase receipts, which are always printed on some thin piece of paper that stains easily and seems to have a life (and short lifespan) of its own.
- Those which require you to mail them a copy within 7 days, failing which your warranty is void. Seriously, there are so many of them to mail in one go if you've just built a new rig.
- Requires a dealer's stamp, serial no./model no. etc., which you forgot to get while you were at the shop, or can't figure out anymore after you've thrown away the packaging, respectively.
Now, I'm going to try my luck with the distributor anyway.
WD Raptor 74GB, 16MB cache. These two are really heavy!I switched over to a new RAID0/striping setup, with 2 Hitachi 500GB double platter hard disks with 16MB cache each. It only cost me S$154! Cheaper if I could pay in cash. It's a temporary solution, because I couldn't wait a few weeks to get the replacement done (funding proposal deadline is 2 days from now). I plan to sell the pair of Raptors after I've replaced them, offsetting some of my losses. Or move them to my planned new overclocking system (since I've an entire set of spare peripherals already).
I'll talk about my new RAID array first before I review my old setup.
Firstly, I realized from carrying my CPU around after switching over to the Hitachis (with my weak build) that the Raptors are really heavy compared to your typical hard disk.
The pair mated to give me 931GB capacity. 6.05GB/$, which is much nicer than the 138GB or <0.276gb/$(lower, because I'm estimating $500 when I remember they should've cost more) for my Raptors. And I still have another drive in E:\ as a backup, which is important for any RAID0 user.
Without many new installations, both boot Vista in less than 4 repetitions of the loading bar animation. I didn't feel any major inconveniences moving over from the old setup to the new one, so I'm guessing the average user wouldn't either. Everything feels more or less as fast.
The most obvious difference is the copying rate though: the Raptors copied in the 10^2 MB/s range, while my new setup only performs in the 10^1 MB/s range.
Strangely, my motherboard's driver incompatibilities etc. went away after changing over. The SATA RAID manager had very bad issues with the Raptors - e.g. BSODs when I try to copy over 2GB of files from C:\ to my backup Seagate 500GB/7200rpm/32MB cache in E:\. Or when I try to multi-task a playlist from E:\ and something else on C:\.
I'll see how the system performs in Windows 7 when I've time to make the transition.
In short, the bottom line's that it was a pretty nice purchase experience. The most obvious thing that stood out was that my new setup is really cheap and affordable as compared to the single WD VelociRaptor 300GB I was deliberating (S$330~), and certainly performs close to what it would have.
Now, back to my old Raptors. I had them for almost 2 years. The RAID array failed me twice, needing a rebuild on each occasion, and at least one of the hard disks died on me eventually (making that three problems in 2 years). However, I can't help but to point out that my MATLAB ran a partial differential equation solution in 4min+ as compared to Samuel's at 11min+ (he has the 'regular' 7200rpm SATA HDD, of unknown make). The difference is huge when it comes to computing. Although you should really be using a supercomputer when you're into hardcore computing (I spent about 5 full days executing a code 36001x8 times, on my PC and laptop in parallel), to the non-professional user who wants to game, encode etc. on his/her PC as well, the Raptors really shine. It is essentially not a multivariate problem of finding the best balance of features for this category of users, but a single variable problem of finding the 'fastest' setup possible.
So that said, I like experimenting with new setups, so the next time I have a chance, I'd try 4 'regular'/7200rpm SATA hard disk drives in RAID0, with a dedicated hardware RAID card from 3ware. But a pair of VelociRaptors remains a close second in order of priority. To anyone else, I'd recommend 2 regular SATA hard disk drives in RAID0 using the motherboard's software RAID, +1 more hard disk as a backup, like what I'm using now. It's a point of high performance to value ratio.
As for non-RAID setups... nah. RAID is a point of no return once you've tried it, really. Despite 3 failures in 2 years (which I could say should be attributed to the WD Raptors' make, and not the RAID architecture), I'd still say so confidently.
Without many new installations, both boot Vista in less than 4 repetitions of the loading bar animation. I didn't feel any major inconveniences moving over from the old setup to the new one, so I'm guessing the average user wouldn't either. Everything feels more or less as fast.
The most obvious difference is the copying rate though: the Raptors copied in the 10^2 MB/s range, while my new setup only performs in the 10^1 MB/s range.
Strangely, my motherboard's driver incompatibilities etc. went away after changing over. The SATA RAID manager had very bad issues with the Raptors - e.g. BSODs when I try to copy over 2GB of files from C:\ to my backup Seagate 500GB/7200rpm/32MB cache in E:\. Or when I try to multi-task a playlist from E:\ and something else on C:\.
I'll see how the system performs in Windows 7 when I've time to make the transition.
In short, the bottom line's that it was a pretty nice purchase experience. The most obvious thing that stood out was that my new setup is really cheap and affordable as compared to the single WD VelociRaptor 300GB I was deliberating (S$330~), and certainly performs close to what it would have.
Now, back to my old Raptors. I had them for almost 2 years. The RAID array failed me twice, needing a rebuild on each occasion, and at least one of the hard disks died on me eventually (making that three problems in 2 years). However, I can't help but to point out that my MATLAB ran a partial differential equation solution in 4min+ as compared to Samuel's at 11min+ (he has the 'regular' 7200rpm SATA HDD, of unknown make). The difference is huge when it comes to computing. Although you should really be using a supercomputer when you're into hardcore computing (I spent about 5 full days executing a code 36001x8 times, on my PC and laptop in parallel), to the non-professional user who wants to game, encode etc. on his/her PC as well, the Raptors really shine. It is essentially not a multivariate problem of finding the best balance of features for this category of users, but a single variable problem of finding the 'fastest' setup possible.
So that said, I like experimenting with new setups, so the next time I have a chance, I'd try 4 'regular'/7200rpm SATA hard disk drives in RAID0, with a dedicated hardware RAID card from 3ware. But a pair of VelociRaptors remains a close second in order of priority. To anyone else, I'd recommend 2 regular SATA hard disk drives in RAID0 using the motherboard's software RAID, +1 more hard disk as a backup, like what I'm using now. It's a point of high performance to value ratio.
As for non-RAID setups... nah. RAID is a point of no return once you've tried it, really. Despite 3 failures in 2 years (which I could say should be attributed to the WD Raptors' make, and not the RAID architecture), I'd still say so confidently.
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