# RAID with Caviar Green and Caviar Black



## jasper1605 (Jan 16, 2010)

Do the drives need to be exactly identical like 2 caviar greens only for a RAID 0 set up?  Or can they be one green and one black so long as they are the same size (500gb if interested)

Thanks


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## slyfox2151 (Jan 16, 2010)

one can be green or black. as long as there simmiler drives it will work. if your using an intel chipset to raid with then you can run multiple raid levels on the same 2 drives. for example 250GB of raid 0 and 300gb of raid 5 on the 2nd half of the hdd.


on a side note, sometimes the green drives dont respond intime and your raid controller  will mark them as defective, but i havnt seen that happen yet.


it would be a lot better to use 2 black drives, they have a much better throughput and responce time.


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## jasper1605 (Jan 16, 2010)

Thanks for that.  I will more than likely end up getting 2 black hdds.  but now I'm in a dilemma of what do I do with my current Green drive that I have? lol.


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## slyfox2151 (Jan 16, 2010)

keep it for extra storage separate from the raid? or add it to the raid0, would give you more througput however it would also incress latency slightly.


best option would be to keep it for backups of data you would prefer not to lose should your raid0 break for some reson. (had it happen once due to a novice near my pc -.-)


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## Melvis (Jan 16, 2010)

I just got me a 1TB WD Black, its awesome, runs a little hot, but its quick. Isnt the Greens run at 5400rpm? not the 7200 to save on power? Would that be a problem when trying to raid them?


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## slyfox2151 (Jan 16, 2010)

no, 5400 rpm is fine for raid. it has somthing to do with the green drives parking the head or spinning down too often?, they dont respond in time for some raid controllers and so get marked as defective. but thats from rumors iv read, havnt seen it happen personaly or read any post looking for a reson why there raid breaks from running green drives.


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## jasper1605 (Jan 16, 2010)

Also, the 5400 is on the notebook green drives.  As far as I'm aware my green drive that I have is a 7200.

I think I'll just go with 2x blacks and keep the green in to use as a backup within my system.  (why do I always go the most expensive route lol)


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## slyfox2151 (Jan 16, 2010)

its the best route in this situation , then again you could buy a 3rd or 4th drive for even faster throughput.


if buying 2 new drives, i would recomend the Spin point samsung F3 drives, best performace allround ( according to reviews/benchmarks.)

they wouldnt be a LOT faster then the black drives tho so if they cost more then its prolly not worth it. (greater then $10 or $20 more.)


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## jasper1605 (Jan 16, 2010)

Sorry for being rather uneducated in this but I've never really done much with RAID stuff (nothing to be more accurate)  In a RAID 0 set up.  Where would I set my OS to boot from?

Also, doesn't samsung have lower reliability on their hdds?


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## slyfox2151 (Jan 16, 2010)

i would put WD and samsung with simmiler reliability, maybe WD is better but i havnt had either drives fail yet i would google it and make up your own mind on witch to buy.

as for the OS. you can install it to the RAID0 or to the WD green drive( it will say Raid somthing as a boot option once its setup and not WD black drive). personaly i would install it to the Green drive. that way if your raid0 breaks you can still boot into windows and if you needed to, you could recover the data from the raid using various tools ( unless one of the drives is defective)


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## jasper1605 (Jan 16, 2010)

will the 16mb cache in the f3 affect it vs the 32mb cache in the WD?


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## slyfox2151 (Jan 16, 2010)

this benchmark shows a samsung F3 with 16mb and 32mb vs a WD caviar black with 64mb cache.
both F3 drives win not by a large amount but thats only for throughput and its only one benchmark, im sure they also have a better responce time.


http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/.../h2benchw-3.12-Avg-Write-Throughput,1013.html



imo grab witch ever drive is cheaper. 

EDIT

on second thort get the WD black  apparently they have much lower lattency according to this benchmark 
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...arts/h2benchw-3.12-Read-Access-Time,1007.html

guess i was wrong.

WD black - 11.90
Spinpoint f3 - 13.60

and the green edition, a whoppping 18.80
(lower is better)


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## jasper1605 (Jan 16, 2010)

sry, this should be the last question.  Isn't that a really small difference in latency?  The first link you gave me showed the f3 being much faster at whichever benchtest that was so isn't it a worthy tradeoff?


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## slyfox2151 (Jan 16, 2010)

there is a 7mbps difference in throughput and 1.70ms difference in latency,

imo it would be better to go for the lower latency as it has a greater difference in comparrison.

your already going to get around 220mbps throughput with the WD vs 230 .. it wont make as much of a difference as the lattency will.


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## n-ster (Jan 16, 2010)

if you don't need space... maybe a SSD? OCZ vertex 30gb look good  on special for a couple of hours...

They are GREAT!!!! get 2 in RAID 0 and you will want to do naughty things  at least one, it will beat the RAID 0 of WD blacks


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## slyfox2151 (Jan 16, 2010)

im thinking 30gb wouldnt be enough for his needs by the sounds of it.


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## DirectorC (Jan 16, 2010)

That's a mighty waste of a Caviar Black. :shadedshu


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## slyfox2151 (Jan 16, 2010)

DirectorC said:


> That's a mighty waste of a Caviar Black. :shadedshu



?????? how so

unless i missed your point, adding 2 in a raid0 would only make them faster?


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## n-ster (Jan 16, 2010)

slyfox2151 said:


> im thinking 30gb wouldnt be enough for his needs by the sounds of it.



He already has a 500gb HD, so use that as storage and the 30gb as OS + most used games/apps


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## DirectorC (Jan 16, 2010)

slyfox2151 said:


> ?????? how so
> 
> unless i missed your point, adding 2 in a raid0 would only make them faster?



Well, I'm referring to the original question, Green+Black RAID0 = WTF.


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## slyfox2151 (Jan 16, 2010)

n-ster said:


> He already has a 500gb HD, so use that as storage and the 30gb as OS + most used games/apps



possible, however i would susgest using either 2 of those ssd's or a larger 60gb as 30gb wouldnt be enough to hold the os + more then 1 recent game... 12gb for the windows directory + things like drivers and other such stuff dosnt leave a whole lot of room.

but i do agree it might be a better option. maybe install your os to a small partition for the highest throughput / latency and put a few games on the SSD or whatever.




DirectorC said:


> Well, I'm referring to the original question, Green+Black RAID0 = WTF.




thx for clearing that up  if you read what i posted i told him it would be a bad idea to use a green with a black drive.


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## jasper1605 (Jan 16, 2010)

I was just curious if it would work.  I had a feeling that mixing green and black together was dumb but I thought I'd ask.  And a 30gb ssd is too small for me to get any useful stuff out of it and 2 of them or a larger one costs a touch too much for me 

Edit: Don't the SSD's need a bay to rest in too?  I don't think my pc has any 2.5" slots or do they make 3.5" ssds?


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## slyfox2151 (Jan 16, 2010)

jasper1605 said:


> I was just curious if it would work.  I had a feeling that mixing green and black together was dumb but I thought I'd ask.  And a 30gb ssd is too small for me to get any useful stuff out of it and 2 of them or a larger one costs a touch too much for me
> 
> Edit: Don't the SSD's need a bay to rest in too?  I don't think my pc has any 2.5" slots or do they make 3.5" ssds?



i just taped my SSD to my case... there very light and dont get hot.. dosnt need to be screwed in like a hdd.


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## jasper1605 (Jan 16, 2010)

in regards to the 30gb not being enough i'll just save up for this guy

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227502


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## slyfox2151 (Jan 16, 2010)

ill go halvs with you


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## jasper1605 (Jan 16, 2010)

Even half of that price is still more than what I've got in my entire computer (not the speakers though.  Them's nice speakers. 7.1 paradigm surround sound on a yamaha amp   )


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## n-ster (Jan 16, 2010)

I think fry's have a 1100$ sub at 300 or 400$ ATM  IMO 2x vertex in raid 0 will be better than having a threesome with the 2 hottest women on earth


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## Loosenut (Jan 18, 2010)

jasper1605 said:


> in regards to the 30gb not being enough i'll just save up for this guy
> 
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227502


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## smashed_99cbr (Jan 18, 2010)

slyfox2151 said:


> one can be green or black. as long as there simmiler drives it will work. if your using an intel chipset to raid with then you can run multiple raid levels on the same 2 drives. for example 250GB of raid 0 and 300gb of raid 5 on the 2nd half of the hdd.
> 
> 
> on a side note, sometimes the green drives dont respond intime and your raid controller  will mark them as defective, but i havnt seen that happen yet.
> ...



I have only seen that happen if the system crashes...


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## Goodman (Jan 18, 2010)

> slyfox2151 said:
> 
> 
> > if your using an intel chipset to raid with then you can run multiple raid levels on the same 2 drives.



So does AMD chipset (ATI 7xx series)

Anyhow you can use 2 different drives for raid the only thing is both drives will fonction as fast as the slower speed of the 2 drives (as the 5400rpm)

One thing to remember is the more drive you get in the raid the higher random access (ms)  you'll have

Exemple : if 2 drives got the same speed & all , lets say 65MB/s & 12.5ms random access then in raid0 they will become at about +- 120MB/s with 13-14ms random access time & the only way to get better random access time in raid0 is to short stroking the drives

Now you never did raid setup , right?
What do know about it & what do you expect from raid0?
It may not be for you at all?

But i can tell you right away from experiences as for benchmarks it is faster & you'll have a nice burst speed but as real world applications or games you wont see much differences


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## jasper1605 (Jan 21, 2010)

I did not know that Goodman.  

I was thinking that RAID 0 just made things faster for me.  So you're saying that if i'm more of a gamer that it wouldn't do me much of a favor to set my new drives up in raid 0?  I just bought to samsung spinpoint F3's and have them in a raid 0 atm.  I left my caviar green in my computer too as I would use it as a pseudo backup but my computer (win7 64 bit) only sees the raid 0 drives once in the desktop.  My bios knows all 3 are there.  Is there something I should be doing differently to get my raid set up and the caviar green to be seen on the computer?  my motherboard is asus p7p55d deluxe if that helps too.


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## nukemelamers (Jan 27, 2010)

maybe both black will be better,as the green one can slow it self down when not under load (i think)
i have the caviar black 1tb, its good tho


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