I'm specing out a Dell Optiplex, nothing too fancy but want redundancy for data safety since I forget to backup often enough.

Dell offers a surprisingly affordable RAID 1 setup using a choice of hard drives. That brings up the questions:

-- Will RAID 1 slow down overall computer performance? If so, by how much?

The HDD's offered range from an 80Gb 10K rpm 2X MTBF (4.5 ms seek time) to 250 Gb 7.2K rpm standard duty unit (8.5 ms).

The 80 Gb is the only one rated heavy-duty, but is expensive. I can get two 250 Mb standard units for the same price. I guess it won't matter with a RAID 1 config what the projected life is anyway.

-- Is a 10K rpm drive louder than a 7.2K drive?

-- Would a RAID 1 setup be substantially louder than a single HDD?

I'd like quiet after listening to my 3 yr. old XPS sounding like an Oreck when it starts working hard, and the standard non-RAID Optiplex is known for being extremely quiet.

Here it is so far. Crappy video card but it's the best they offer plus I can't go overboard with only a 305 watt power supply and RAID:

My System Details
PROCESSOR Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor E6850 (3.0GHz, 4M, VT, 1333MHz FSB) edit
OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows® XP Professional, SP2, x32, with Media, English edit
REMOTE MANAGEMENT ASF Basic Hardware Enabled Systems Management edit
MEMORY 2GB DDR2 Non-ECC SDRAM,800MHz, (2 DIMM) edit
HARD DRIVE 250GB RAID 1 SATA 3.0Gb/s and 8MB DataBurst Cache™ edit
OPTICAL DRIVE 16X DVD+/-RW SATA, Roxio Creator™ CyberlinkPowerDVD™ edit
VIDEO CARD 256MB ATI Radeon 2400 XT, Dual Monitor DVI or VGA (TV-out), full height edit
MONITOR No Monitor edit
ENERGY SMART Dell Energy Smart Enable edit
FILE SYSTEM NTFS File System for all Operating Systems edit
SHIP PACKAGING OPTIONS Shipping Material for System, Minitower edit
My Accessories
FLOPPY & MEDIA READER No Floppy Drive edit
SPEAKERS No Speaker, OptiPlex edit
KEYBOARD Dell USB Keyboard, No Hot Keys edit
MOUSE Dell USB 2-Button Entry Mouse with Scroll, Black edit
1394 CARD 1394 FW Controller Card, FH edit
My Software
SYSTEM DOCUMENTATION Resources CD contains Diagnostics and Driver for Dell OptiPlex Systems edit
REFERENCE GUIDE Quick Reference Guide, Dell OptiPlex 755 edit
My Services & Warranties
WARRANTY & SERVICE 3 Year Basic Limited Warranty and 3 Year NBD On-Site Service edit
ON-SITE SYSTEM SETUP No Onsite System Setup edit
HARD DRIVE PARTITION Custom Hard Drive Partition, 40GB Primary, Remainder Secondary edit

 

You will not notice a diffrence, and if you have it setup right with a good raid controller (hardware) there will likely be an increase in proformance (you will probably not notice this either)

Yes, some 10k are louder than others, but they are louder than a 7.2

Also yes a raid setup will be louder than a single only because you have more than 1 drive spinning, if you get 3 or 4 10k rpm drives going it can get loud.


A good RAID array and fast drives (10K+) are one of the best speed improvements you can make and will make a huge diffrence if you have been useing IDE drives. You will be amazed how fast a 10k sata2 drive can run.

 

Thanks. The tradeoff is that Dell only offers an 80 Gb 10K drive. I guess that's what external drives are for.

Dell's Optiplex specs list sata only, not sata2. Is 2 on the horizon? If so, I could easily wait awhile, it's looks worthwhile but don't know if it would be noticed as much on a 10K 3.0 Gb/sec drive (another question), and maybe a discount coupon would surface too.

 

Something interesting happened while searching for the answer. Within three hours this thread was on the first page of Google results! Pretty good SEO here.

Anyway, as best I can tell 3.0 Gbps is SATA2, but correct me if I'm wrong. So it looks like I'll be set for speed and the Optiplex has expansion connectors for eSATA, 0, 1 and 2 on board.

So, given a fairly small difference in price between a RAID 1 10K 80 Gb and a 7.2K 250 Gb, which would you go with to future proof the system longest?