Which is faster 2 SATA 0 or WD Raptor?

I was looking to upgrade my hard drives, but came across the choice of:
buy 2 wd 40gb 7200 Sata dirves and raid 0 them,
or 1 wd raptor 36.7gb 10K sata dirve.

The Raid controller that i will be using is the ICH5 (intel).

Raptor:
The Specs of the two drives are:
General
Rotational Speed 10,000 RPM (nominal)
Buffer Size 8 MB
Average Latency 2.99 ms (nominal)
Contact Start/Stop Cycles 20,000 minimum
Seek Times (Average)
Read Seek Time (Average) 5.2 ms
Write Seek Time (Average) 5.9 ms (average)
Track-To-Track Seek Time 0.7 ms (average)
Full Stroke Seek 10.2 ms (average)
Transfer Rates
Buffer To Host (Serial ATA) 150 MB/s (Max)
Buffer To Disk 72 MB/s (Sustained)

wd Caviar
General
Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Buffer Size 8 MB
Average Latency 4.20 ms (nominal)
Contact Start/Stop Cycles 50,000 minimum
Seek Times (Average)
Read Seek Time (Average) 8.9 ms
Write Seek Time (Average) 10.9 ms (average)
Track-To-Track Seek Time 2.0 ms (average)
Full Stroke Seek 21.0 ms (average)
Transfer Rates
Buffer To Host (Serial ATA) 1,200 Mbits/s (Max)
Buffer To Disk 748 Mbits/s (Max)


so my questions are:
which setup would have the best performance?
What would be the pros and cons of each setup?

Thanks in advance.

 

Welcome to the forums! Now you get to deal with my choppy but concise answers:

first to answer your question in brief:
1) raptor hands down
2) raid0 isn't redundant, and logic would put say that the chances of your data being lost forever doubles because of it. but then, 80 gigs is always more than 36, right? as for the raptor, it's a little loud and very very hot, although the speed... the utter speed *drools*

secondary response:
in the real world, raid 0 does nothing to improve performance on a system as a whole. that said, i would definitely go for one of the following options:

single maxtor ultra16 300gb drive with 16mb cache. that thing is about as fast as those raptors
single/dual wd raptor 36 gig
single wd raptor 74 gig

they are all around the same speed. i don't know what your pricerange is, but that should cover all price-range bases

 

Thanks for the info.
My data isnt that inprotant, nothing replacable anyway.

Not to contradict what youre saying but, I thought that raid 0 enabled twice the bandwidth with minimal overhead (ie: reading from 2 disks at once with data striping is faster than reading from one).

Please tell me if im wrong.
Thanks again

 

you're absolutely right. in fact, if you are using that computer solely as a file server, it would theoretically double in speed. but an explanation... well, these guys can explain it 10000x better than i can.

 

Interesting.

I guess that the complexities of configuring as well as the downside of no improvement in seek latency would be the downfall of my fantastic plan to implement raid.

I guess i will go for the raptor as it will feed my perfomance needs better.

Thanks for your help.