i’m thinking about getting an x505 and this would be a must-have accessory for me. just wondering if anyone could give me some feedback. i couldn’t find any reviews on cnet.
I personally will not buy any WD products, i’ve had more then 3 drives fail on me and that’s about all I will take. Honestly, if you ask 10 computer users all will give you their opinion on which drives are good and bad…so I wouldn’t want to discourage you from getting the unit. I love maxtor and there are plenty that claim they have had failed drives.
I went with a smaller unit because I wanted it to be ultra-portable. This unit is larger but appears to be able to take a small beating and its faster and has more space, so it looks like a good solution if you need it.
I have three of those enclosures that i’ve bought OEM notebook drives for. If they’re not stylish enough for you, just go to newegg and look for external enclosures. They make dozens of them now…for both USB2 and firewire.
If you’re building a home rig with raptors, go for disk striping. Screw backups, i’m all about maximizing speed.
If RAID 0 makes you nervous, do what i do. I have striped volume (0) for your windows/programs installations and then buy another physical hard drive 300gb+ which you backup on a regular basis to store all your important stuff. If you’re feeling really paranoid, you can image the windows install and restore it if the raptor fails.
I tend to do an image restore every couple months anyways in order to get rid of the junk.
BTW, i’ve built about half a dozen machines like this for my family/friends. The one thing they’ve all noted is how quickly windows boots and only one RAID0 failure. This was caused by three fans (intake/outtake) that ceased to work and weren’t noticed. The machine got too hot and the hard drive got fried. WD did an instant RMA online and i had new drives by the end of the week.
[quote author=“Sony Vaio”]is there a big performance difference between raid 0 and raid 10?
what controller fuer the raid system can you recommend?
will choose a mobo from abit
Assuming you are building a game/web/email machine, you probably won’t see a terrible difference between RAID 10, RAID 0 and just a single disk. For onboard controllers, I seem to remember that AnandTech did a RAID 0 vs a single disk test that had no impact on disk performance.
there is no way that RAID 0 will benchmark the same as a single disk. It may be that on certain applications , the drive benchmarks may be unaffected, but any disk intensive application will be greatly afffected by using RAID 0. It also makes a difference as to the size of your clusters and your application.
RAID 5 seem to be overkill for home application as it requires enough disks for both parity and striping. RAID 10 is actually just a mutant of 0 and 1 and is even greater overkill.
If you go with speedy disks (raptors/scsi’s) they tend to be small, so they don’t make good storage devices anyways. That’s why you should consider a separate IDE controller for your data disk of 300GB+.
I recently had to replace my Gigabyte 8knxp motherboard, which is probably the best mobo out there in terms of features. It’s also extraordinarily expensive at 200+ dollars. But it gave me a P4 478 chipset with 2 ATA100, 2 ATA133, and 4 SATA channels (2 controllers). That’s a lot of hard drives that you can load up. I replaced it with an ABIT IC7, which is also 478 based. It gives you 2 ata133 and 2 SATA controllers (4 channels).
[quote author=“gotolam”]there is no way that RAID 0 will benchmark the same as a single disk. It may be that on certain applications , the drive benchmarks may be unaffected, but any disk intensive application will be greatly afffected by using RAID 0. It also makes a difference as to the size of your clusters and your application.
That application caveat is critical. Unless your applications require lots of I/O bandwidth, like video editing, you’re not gong to see a noticable increase. Anand al Shimpi’s testing seems to bear this out.
