Comparison between 10,000 RPM HDs and 7,200 RPM HDs with SSD Cache

[Rashid]

I am trying to build a new system using Intel Core i7 3930K Sandy Bridge CPU and an Asus X79 motherboard. I am going for Asus motherboards because they support SSD caching of HDs. I will be using 250 GB hard disk for data storage and for installing O.S. Which type of hard disk should I buy that will be supported by RAID 1, 10,000 RPM Hard Disk or 7,200 RPM Hard Disk?

[Vicky Woodley]

Using the SSD cached feature for storage of data of large size with setup for RAID level 1 sounds like very expensive item. If you are so determined on using this setup then you should check details for compatibility and stability. If your motherboard includes native Intel sata3 and Marvell sata3 ports, then Intel sata3 ports will give you best compatibility and stability. But since you mentioned RAID 1 level hard disk, let me tell you that they don’t work well with Intel sata3 ports.

[ErikaGeek]

If you are looking for fast storage device then you have 2 options, RAID or large driver. The SSD devices are similar to interleaving used by traditional RAM and stack in channels based on the number of NAND chips available in PCB. So this means that drive with higher capacity will write and read data faster than the drive with small storage capacity. Intel is claiming to trim RAID level 0 and RAID level 1 in their upcoming hard drives. This will allow faster data read & write.

[phunsuk]

The bigger the 7,200 RPM drives with 16 MB cache memory even if used on RAID level 0 don’t perform efficiently as we think. Moreover you might need to defragment the disk frequently. This is because the disk writes the data in random memory spaces most of the time. If you are using your computer for internet browsing and text editing then 7200 RPM drive is more than enough. If you need your computer for heavy tasks like video or audio editing, then you might need 10,000 RPM hard drive.

[Denholm]

Why don’t you try running RAID level 5 hard drive on your system? While using this if your motherboard fails, you don’t lose your data. If any section of the drive loses its data, the other sections recreate the data, maybe not everything, but 90 % of data can be recovered. RAID level 5 disk have parity data distributed across all members disk. In other words, RAID level 5 drives support function of Redundancy. RAID level 5 drives will give you ¾th of total storage space when using 4 drives for storing parity data. RAID level 1 disks give you ½ of total storage space.