BlogAfter almost 3 weeks of waiting since my
last SATA RAID attempt, my replacement
WD Raptor 74GB drive finally arrived. I wasted no time in setting up the SATA RAID and quickly ran the benchmark in case another drive decided to die. As you can see from the
high tech animation my random read went from 14.9ms to 7.8ms and my average read went from 63MB/s to 114MB/s, both of which represent almost double performance. Not quite the 150MB/s I was hoping for, but definately a nice improvement. I then proceeded to do the fastest WinXP load of my life on the new RAID, requiring only 13 minutes from start to finish. Now even internet browsing seems faster and the drives are whisper quiet (I can only hear fans now). The true test of archive decompression comes soon, but so far the increase in speed is well worth the reduction from 240GB to 140GB. The extra 100GB was used for softcore porn anyways, and we all know hardcore is the only stuff worth keeping.