I mentioned this in Reece's Ubuntu questions thread...
I lost a Hard drive about a month ago, which wiped out my RAID 0 (striped, no redundancy). Fortunately I had copied the entire "Home" directory to another drive, so I lost only a few save games from HL2...
After trying some WD Black 7200 RPM drives, I finally managed to find another 2TB Seagate.
(I found out, WD 1TB are single platter drives, 2TB/3TB/4TB, are 3/4/5 platters respectively, which means that the larger drives are faster on load times.)
Of all the drives I have, 2 1TB Seagate (backup, not operating unless copying to the drive), 4 2TB Seagate, and 4 1TB WD Black, using 1GB file sizes for benchmark...
1TB Seagates averaged about 182MB/Sec Read/Write speed (each), peak at 202MB/sec.
2TB average about 180MB/Sec, peak 200MB/S, with the replacement peaking at
217MB/s (!). Minimum for all Seagates at the "end" of the drive is 100MB/Sec.
WD 1TB average about 167MB/Sec, peak at about 190-195 (over 4 drives). Minimum of about 100MB/S.
In a Raid 0:
WD 650MB/Sec average in the first 30% of the drive, after that it slowed down to a minimum of 400MB/Sec. And for some reason the system kept trying to put the "home" directory at the slow end of the drive ...
Kept having trouble manually setting up the Raid, install program can be a bit fussy about pre-existing Raids.
My Seagates where averaging 765MB/Sec on the "home" partition, which was over 1TB in size, meaning it was faster across the
first half of the drive, than the WD 1TB were in the first quarter of the drive...
Peaked at 800MB/Sec, with a minumum of 400MB/S on the "slow" end.
I retried the WDs in RAID 10, and it was even worse.... but it would have some redundancy... But I finally found a store with Seagate drives in stock, so I picked up another 2TB, and setup a RAID 10.
This time I setup a RAID 10 far configuration in Linux.
In RAID 10 Far, I get about (with the same partition sizes as before) 720-729MB/Sec read speed. Now because it has to write a mirror of everything (the "1" part of the "10")
Write speed is about half, about 350-370MB/Sec (give or take about 20MB/sec).
So I'm finally up, my backup copied back to my system, and I'm running at about 95% of my original speed, but with a bit of redundancy, I can (but hopefully won't) lose another drive, and NOT lose the whole system!
Moral of the story... make backups.
2nd Moral of the story, I can't simply say.... "my PC is fixed".
Barracuda