Which choice do you think would provide the better performance for the price?

Keep in mind that the Raptor configuration will cost around $140 more. Is it worth it?

2xWD Raptor 74G Raid 0 is what I currently have in my rig. It was fun to have super fastness, but I'd rather not risk my OS to any sort of raid configuration at all. If it's NOT for your OS then go balls to the wall. The pain in the ass that you have to keep that floppy drive around with the raid drivers for your motherboard because installing XP (maybe it works better in Vista install?) won't work without it.

The problem with Raptors is that they are SATA I, not II. I was able to max the bandwidth at 150MB/s.

The best part of the raptors is that you KNOW they arn't going to fail like some POS random hard drive.

My next box is just going to have a single raptor 150GB in it. Not worth the hassle. Saves on power consumption as well.

i'd go with the parity setup, raptors are nice and all but nothing beats having your data mirrored

I am leaning towards the RAID 5 just for redundancy. I have checked some comparisons and with onboard RAID controllers you will get better system performance from just RAID 0, but you still get better performance than a single drive alone.

So for the poll results are 50/50

I assume you have the 4 80gig drives already? I can't understand why someone would buy 4 of them when you can get a 320gig drive for less than the price of 2 80's. It would probably be just as fast as 4 80's in a raid array too. Personally I think you're wasting your space and energy using 4 80's. If you want redundancy, get 2 320's or 250's and mirror them.

And no.. the raid drivers aren't that much easier for Vista install. BUT you don't need a floppy, they can also be on a CD, DVD or even a USB drive.

With RAID 5 though I get redundancy AND performance increase. I don't have any 80gig drives at the moment, but at less than $50 a pop, who cares.

And all of this might not mean anything. I'm trying to decide should I do some performance upgrades on my current system (like q6600 and HD's) or am I going to build an inexpensive HTPC.

Not sure what to do yet.

http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchm ... h_sort.php

Check out some of these drive benchmarks. The 80GB ones seem to be quite slow when compared to most 400-500GB drives you can get quite cheaply now so you might be better off with two larger drives in RAID 1 or a single Raptor (although you wouldn't have a backup) to save money and energy... I suppose it's not as "cool" but whatever it gets the job done.

Backups are not a concern. I run nightly backups of everything on my system that is of importance to another hard drive.

The big advantage of RAID 5 is that if a drive dies, I don't lose everything. I just drop a new one in and go.

A nightly backup of the important data would be enough for me personally but it's up to you I guess.

Also remember that 4 drives are 4 times as likely to have 1 die than having a single drive die on you. And if a drive does die you basically only had a 1/4 chance that it actually saved you and a 3/4 chance that you wouldn't have had the problem if there was just 1 drive. Just some more odds/percentages to think about.

If you're doing nightly backups, why not just got straight for speed and go RAID 0. With either Raptors, or some of bigger (320+) RAID drives, chances are you'd end up formatting or getting a new computer before one of them dies anyway.

Good point. It's hard to keep a computer for more than a year. 2 years kills me.

Maybe I should look at a pair of the new Seagate 500gb with 32mb cache in RAID 0.

i totally agree with that. i have a single 500GB w/32MB cache and it simply flies. far faster than my 160GB and 250GB drives (8MB and 16MB caches respectively).
so for about $60 more than the 4x80GB drives you're getting far more performance and FAR more space. The only thing you're losing is the backup.

At least my data is still backed up. I have 2 x 250gig drives in there now and I back up from one to the other nightly (2 different brands so RAID 1 is a no go)

RAID 0 is a much better option if you just want speed.

In my limited experience, RAID 5 isn't really much (if any) of a performance increase over one single drive. It does have to compute that parity drive after all. If you are going to have a hardware RAID controller, then its a bit of a different story. They are pretty expensive though - the controller cards.

I like the idea of the 2 500gig drives. As stated.. much better performance and more space.

i dunno if this helps but i noticed a huge difference in load up times sine i put a sata2 250 gb hdd in for my master drive. but u prolly want faster then that eh