hard drive or hard drives?

[jr357]

ok here's the deal i'm building a gaming rig and i've got everything worked out except the harddrive what do you all thing is best (speed)for my set up 2 40gig western's 7200rpm or one 120 gig 8mg buffer western for harddrive?
any thoughts on this would be great.
rest of system:asus a7v333-pa-raid
xp2000+
512mb ddr 333mhz
volcano cpu fan
evga 4600 ti with cooler
mitsumi d359m3d floppy
lite-on ltd163 dvd-rom
lg 32x10x40x 8mg buffer cd rewrite drive
windows xp pro
case directron sf-201-b alum.case six fan's

[saphalline]

The special Western Digital HD's with 8MB buffer simply scream for a single hard drive. And with a dual 40GB RAID system you can probably increase your HD speed by 30-40%. RAID gives you less reliability, however, and 80GB is still a far cry from 120GB, so...

I'd go for the extra space myself, and the bragging rights of having one of the best HD's in existence right now. For pure speed, RAID is the way to go. Also, if you go for a huge main hard drive, you can probably afford to get those two 40GB HD's afterall in about a year (or less), and at about half the price you'd pay now. Hard drives have been dropping at an incredible rate, so storage will just keep getting cheaper.

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"No, we do not gnaw on our kitty." - Dr. Evil

[skhips]

Sorry I think the advantages and disadvantages for RAID are the other way around.

Due to the fact that RAID is used (Depending which type) data is spread over your harddrives (repeatedly) allowing greater reliability but with a slight speed loss.

e.g some of our servers have 6 RAID HDD installed, if one of the HDD crashes the server will stop operating as all the contents of that HDD are spread acroos the others, we can then remove and reinsert that faulty HDD (in a removable caddy), insert it and it will be rebuilt off the other HDD's without even powering down the machine.

http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

[iisbob]

Actually if you are using RAID 0 ( striping ) it'll be faster than say a single ATA66 drive , however current ATA100/133 specs give you pretty much the same speed. Caveat with using RAID 0 is that if 1 drive fails, you lose data on both, but you could use RAID 1 and have a mirror setup so that if 1 drive fails you would still have the same data on the 2nd drive and could just hot swap the bad one.

RAID 5 adds even more fault tolerance with 3 drives that allow you to spread the data about.

RAID on a home system is kinda useless, since it's primary benfit is the ability to not lose speed as it is accessed by multiple users; whereas a single IDE drive would start to seriously slow down with multiple calls upon it.

Stick with a single large drive, and partition it if you feel the need for fault tolerance, 1 partition for OS and another for data for example.

If you truely want ultimatre speed, then Ultrafast SCSI 3 ( 160MB's persec standard data transfer rate )is still the best-at least until the new Serial ATA standard comes out.



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iisbob

There is no such thing as a stupid question; just an improper one.-my own belief

[Paleo Pete]

I agree with iisbob here, RAID is kinda pointless for most home users, unless you're into serious HTML, video, graphics editing or word processing where maintaining data is imperative.

RAID was designed and intended for corporate network server use where data loss can be extremely costly. One server down for a few hours to replace a drive could feasibly cost thousands of dollars or more, and having multiple users accessing the server constantly tends to bog down even SCSI drives.

For home users, RAID is basically overkill, very few home users really have a legitimate need for RAID systems. I would go with a dual drive setup myself, I like having storage on a separate physical drive, if the primary crashes, all files saved are on a secondary drive...just the OS and programs on the primary. Occasional backups to CD help too.

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[jr357]

thanks everyone for the info once again i'm in your debt!

[xcirex]

rest of system:asus a7v333-pa-raid
xp2000+
512mb ddr 333mhz
volcano cpu fan
evga 4600 ti with cooler
mitsumi d359m3d floppy
lite-on ltd163 dvd-rom
lg 32x10x40x 8mg buffer cd rewrite drive
windows xp pro
case directron sf-201-b alum.case six fan's

I would suggest you to buy a fan other than the volcano,
volcano might drop temperature 1 to 2o, but its TOO LOUD :x
i have one and i can't stand it