Hard Drive Choices?

[Fayd]

let's assume i have a game that is highly page intensive. (as opposed to sequential read/write intensive)

i want to upgrade my OS/swap harddrive choice.

Do i pay $340 to get 2 150gig raptors? (newegg)

or 200 to get a SAS raid controller (newegg), and 50-75 per drive to get some used 15k rpm, 74 gig drives from fs/ft?

I'm thinking the second option, but i'm looking for confirmation.

regardless of what i choose for OS/swap, i'm gonna be getting a single 500 gig as my programs/data drive.

this is the controller i have in mind.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16816118087

OS is windows XP, but i want to get Vista x64 in the near future.

 

[newschool]

you cant raid with your motherboard? why dont just buy a new motherboard with raid for like 130$

 

[Tarrant64]

Originally posted by: Fayd
let's assume i have a game that is highly page intensive. (as opposed to sequential read/write intensive)

i want to upgrade my OS/swap harddrive choice.

Do i pay $340 to get 2 150gig raptors? (newegg)

or 200 to get a SAS raid controller (newegg), and 50-75 per drive to get some used 15k rpm, 74 gig drives from fs/ft?

I'm thinking the second option, but i'm looking for confirmation.

regardless of what i choose for OS/swap, i'm gonna be getting a single 500 gig as my programs/data drive.

this is the controller i have in mind.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16816118087

OS is windows XP, but i want to get Vista x64 in the near future.

No game, is going to force you to get a SAS controller to raid some 15k SCSI drives. Your choices are overkill. You can find a cheap mobo with raid support for less than $100 these days too. For most medium to high-end systems it comes standard.

You could spend less than $200 for a decent 160GB+ RAID 0 array. Mind you that you will have no data protection(redundancy).

 

[Fayd]

umm.... the 2 150gig raptors would be for Raid0, with the onboard raid on my motherboard. (ICH9R)

the SAS Raid card would be so that i could create a Raid Array with SAS drives. means i factor in the cost of the SAS raid card into the total upgrade costs.


I have a raid0 array right now, in the form of 2x 160gig Hitachi Deskstars. but they are not fast enough for my liking. hence why i want to separate the tasks into low latency, medium sequential data transfer (raid0 SAS or raptor) and high latency, relatively high sequential data transfer. (500 gig SATA)

 

[9nails]

A majority of games will be read intensive. Reading audio and graphics from file is the major part of a game. Then repeat. If you're have a puny amount of RAM, then I might see where your game needs to start to use page files to compensate for the lack of RAM. But clearly more RAM would be the answer in this case. Write intensive games, probably not so much the norm. I'm curious which game you have in mind. If it's called Microsoft SQL, then I totally see where you're going with this

I have an ICH9 motherboard with RAID 0 and dual Raptor 150's, and I must say that I'm more than pleased with the access to load games. Having used many SAS drives in different RAID configurations at work for about a year now, I can tell you that the SAS drives are a perfect match for my servers. But I'm only using 2.5" SAS drives currently, which still deliver amazing performances near Raptor speeds at a fraction of the power. The 3.5 flavor SAS drives don't fit into my servers, but I'd imagine that they wouldn't upset in the performance department. Finding ones used might be the issue, they are 2X to 5X more than a Raptor in equal size. Just for price to performance sake, I'd stay with the Raptors and you'd be happy. But if you had a Genie granting your wishes, take the SAS route.

 

[Tarrant64]

If you've got money to spend, waste away.