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Drive Speed Comparisons - 7200RPM vs. 5400RPM in RAID?

Posted by Cliff on from the is-faster-always-better dept.

O asks: "Looking at Pricewatch for new drives, it seems that the prices for a 60GB 5400rpm drive and a 40GB 7200rpm drive are about the same. I do have ATA/100 RAID on my motherboard, and I'm wondering how a striped RAID of 5400rpm drives would stack up against a single 7200rpm drive? I could sure get a hell of a lot more storage for the money. Any Slashdot readers have experience with this?"

1 of 18 comments (clear)

  1. RAID & striping by Snowfox · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    Perhaps this is only borderline on-topic, but I can't think of a better time to ask...

    When striping, what's a good size to use if the goal is speeding up random access, not overall throughput?

    Suppose I'm wanting to speed up random access to thousands of files, mostly 30k or less, read from or written to in full each time they're accessed. Do I make my stripe size some multiple of that 30k? Is striping even the best solution?

    What about striping to increase overall throughput on large streams? Do you go with some percentage of the drive's cache size? What gives the best performance on long contiguous streams? Again, is there a better solution than striping if performance is the concern, not redundancy?