1-not true. At least locally, they're cheap.

http://www.nmsuperstores.com/html/we...y_specials.cfm

2-storeagereview.com has many reviews, also tomshardware may have those drives reviewed.

I think even western digital has the 3 year warranty. Not sure tho.

Raid 0 is not as unreliable as you think. There are more drives which could go wrong but that's it.

RAID 0 does rock when it comes to speed but then again it is only as reliable as the weakest drive in the array. Yea know, like the weakest link in a chain........it only takes one! :)

I use to have a 5 disk RAID 0 running in my machine, then one day I powered down my system to do a modfication on my video card. Put the card back in and started it up........... Drive #2 dead! &^$%!!! Luckly I was smart and had all my data copied to another HDD in my server. I dont mind so much that the drive failed (because of my backups) but I did mind the time it took to reinstall my OS (I dont believe in backing that up unless it is a PERFECT copy) and then copying all my data back onto the array. Hence the reason why I decided to go with RAID 5.

I also discovered that you really dont loose THAT much performance with RAID 5 vs RAID 0. A (3) disk RAID 5 preforms almost just as well as a (2) disk RAID 0 and writes take just a bit longer. If you get a card with a decent cache module on it, then the difference is almost null.

BigBen: Here is what I say..... if you want flat out speed and really dont care too much about space, GO SCSI. If you want more space and are not too concerned with speed, GO IDE/SATA. If you want reliablity (and speed), GO RAID 1 SCSI.

Done! :)

all SATA drives and all ATA100 drives have had Sector remapping as a standard feature. it was right around the time that ATA66 was rolling around that the feature started to be implemented on IDE drives.

I have a 4 disc ATA100 array with 40GB WD drices on it, I have thrashed that drive ( its a 160GB array thats in a windows soft RAID0 with 2 120GB drices( with the leftover 40GB going to another partition) its an array I have 90% full of broadcast quality video for editing, so needless to say the array gets beat to crap doing that stuff.

never as little as a hickup with the PROMISE controler it rides on.

and "frequent" backups are not that hard or time consuming. I think it takes about 8 hours for me to get my entire network backed up on DLT's. with a total time of me having to pay attention to it of about 15 minutes. ( to swap tapes).

Also going with single discs is not a safe guard anyway. hell out of every 20 or so SCSI discs that come into me at work, one dies in a few weeks. And these are top end Seagate or Fujitsu 15kRPM U320 73GB SCSI drives.

I dont count on any ATA to last long at all. if you want protection, backup, if you dont, then I dont think your really at any greater risk with one drive or 2.

There are huge downsides of that for some of us.. I have a 480 Gb raid 5, and I could, in theory, convert that to a 600 Gb raid 0 and backup, as you said. But that would require a hell of a lot of dvd's to back it up and would take nearly forever. A tape, I'm not sure of the speed, but I believe they are even slower. I can't wait a week for a backup to commence.
The other issue is when data is often updated. I do a lot of art on my computer where I'm working with very large (500Mb) psd files. Now, If I back up once a month, I still stand to lose the last month's data. Which isn't just limited to time and bandwith to redownload it. It's limited to my inspiration. And let me tell you that inspiration isn't something that comes along twice. So it is imperitive that I not lose data, as it truly is irreplaceable.

That's why I don't worry about losing 1 drive of my raid to not have to worry about losing data. I used to just back everything up on two drives, and this is much more convenient.

btw, I still do back up the important parts of my raid on a friend's raid every lan party.. just in case.

You better not be doing that kind of work on an ATA controler and talking about how imperitive it is not to loose data! ( since you are doing RAID5 I am guessing its a SCSI array with a controler that has some meat to it. Even then, "its all about the config". the new Dell Perc 3di and above controlers all rock for doing auto config rebuilds off the disk setup, but I know Mylex suck at that.

Because in reality the chances of loosing a controler config is much higher than loosing a drive. Some weirdness on a PCI buss, or just a controler freak out or BIOS twitch could send that config into neverland (yes the scary Michael Jackson playground of doom)

RAID5 has the nasty drawback of either: 1. terribly high CPU use on "soft" controlers, or controlers with bad drivers. and 2. Slow write speeds to the disk. ( the write speeds arent much better than one single disk alone I have found) this is also why most high end DB mfg's do not recomend running the DB on a RAID5.

to me performance is as important as stability ( which is why I run SCSI... its the perfect blend of both). I would not sacrifice performance to give me a 1 disk tollerance. RAID 3 in some respects is better than 5. Less CPU use, less Controler CPU use, and you still get the one drive redundancy.

Duplexing is where its at though, if you got the money, and the hardware, nothing beats it. a Mirrored Stripe. but if you are working on 500MB PSD's I am guessing there is some money there anyway :)

Yes, I agree, I went with IDE raid because I wanted size for the buck, over speed, and while I avoid the first drawback you mentioned, I do tend to have somewhat slow write speeds, but that is an acceptable drawback in my mind when I have other drives to do my swapping and more temporary file storage.

And raid 3 only has less cpu usage if you have a bad raid card, and it writes a lot slower because you have the dedicated parity drive rather than spreading that info out among the drives.

Your running RAID 5 on an ATA setup, and you are talking about not wanting to lose data?

I have seen a few horror stories of recent where people have lost the config on those ATA controlers when OC'n or doing anything out of spec on the system.

I think when it comes to RAID... OC'n and such that would mess with the PCI bus or power on the board should be avoided 100% or you will just beg to have that array turn into dust out of no where.

I know I dont trust my ATA arrays at all ( which is why all the data is also on tape :))

My $0.02:

If you don't have time for regular backups, you are gonna end up getting ****ed no matter whether you go with RAID IDE or SCSI or straight drives. If it's important then back it up!

I wouldn't even consider a 10k scsi drive; I'd get the Raptor SATA 10k no question. Performance is similar while you skip the cost of a scsi controller. I have a single newish fujitsu 10k and it is no huge performance boost over my 8meg cache WD 120gb drive. If you are going to use SCSI then quit ****ing around and get a 15k rpm drive. Then in a week when that's full then grab a 200gb ATA drive for pr0n storage :)

thats basicly my deal. SCSI is in the places I need performance, IDE is where I need bulk storrage. IDE is a dime a dozen they are so cheap. even SCSI is coming down in price now.

really if you get a mobo with SCSI on it, get the SCSI drives for it :)

The SATA Raptor is nothing special... IDE people are speaking about it like its the freaking second coming... its a drive using 6 year old technology. (10krpm spindle)... wow. From what I saw in a few "observations" (since they werent reviews), was that the Raptor would be marginally cheaper than SCSI at the same speed. It would really need to be at the current price of IDE drives to really be impressive, hell at that point I could call it the second coming :)

Which in any case SCSI has more technological advantages over SATA still... like Disconnect, Tag Queue'n, etc... but really all the benifits of SCSI are realized in multi drive setups. One SCSI drive on its own shows little improvement ( at same RPM/cache) over IDE counterparts.

Besides, Hitler uses scsi raid 0, so if you use scsi raid 0, your supporting the Nazis.