should I upgrade my hard drive

[Synon25]

I currently have a Western digital caviar 7800 rpm hard drive with 8 meg buffer. I was just wondering if I should upgrade to a 10000 rpm sata drive or possibly to so that I could set up raid. Do you guys think it would be worth the performance boost. Let me know what you think.

 

[amol]

No.

RAID = not for personal machines

 

[Synon25]

Well correct me if i'm wrong but if I set the two drives up for raid 0 it would increase data transfer, and increase my storage performance. Considering I have an 865 perl motherboard which allows for intel raid application accelerator, I just thought it might be beneficial to try and take advantage of it. If anyone has any insight to this could you please let me know thanks.

 

[Farmer]

Who the hell said RAID wasn't for personal machines? I can RAID all I want!

 

[sniperruff]

RAID is overRAIDted. size+price over performance for me. the 2 seconds i save will cost me $$$

 

[stevty2889]

It really depends on what kind of applications you are running. If you are doing video or photo editing, working with large files, raid 0 can make a decent differance, and can have a small affect on load times for some games, but for most things, not much differance

 

[shinotenshi]

Before this question can be answered, we would need to know the typical use of your machine. if its for general use, then raid is not the way to go.
if you need alot of high speed transfers ie, video editing, then raid would give some benifits.

 

[Edward Lee]

Originally posted by: Amol
No.

RAID = not for personal machines

Speak baby talk for me again.

 

[synapse02]

im runnin 4 drives in raid 0, ever since the opteron proc was released.. The drives are mounted in a LianLi alum case next to 2 fans. I could never go without it in my personal machine..

 

[Synon25]

I suppose it would mostly be for gaming, and transferring around large files from my online text game. Would it be worth it given those circumstances?

 

[synapse02]

The animated bar at the bottom of the XP startup screen makes it across about 1 to 1.5 times. You could make a sandwich in the time it takes my buddies single 7200RPM drive to load doom3 or farcry. This thing takes about 15secs or so to load a farcry level.

 

[synapse02]

The only extra overhead is you have to press F6 during the windows installation to install the controller drivers, after that there isnt anything else extra and it behaves as a single drive, thats crazy fast..

All data initially comes from the hard drive(s) and it is the slowest component. Im not sure id recomment a 4 drive array, but a 2 drive array is cake and makes for a much "snappier" and responsive machine.

 

[shinotenshi]

I would say no. get a raptor or 10k drive would give you better performance or in this case what you want, which is faster seek times. aslo getting more ram would mean less loading of games. however if you play a lot of games, and dont want to uninstall them, then just get a large 7200rpm drives. if you want shorter load times and better transfer of small file and dont mind sacraficing strogage space. then a 10k scsi or sata drive would be what you want.

 

[Synon25]

i have one gig of pc3200 ddr 400 ram and that's the best ram that has been tested for my board. So basically just upgrading my hard drive or getting two and going to raid would be my only option. Thanks for all the input guys. I think what i'll do for now is just get a 10 rpm wd raptor. I've heard their kinda noisy, any other suggestions on a good hd?

 

[synapse02]

YES, i have a suggestion. Get two 7200RPM 80GB maxtor drives that have fluid dynamic bearings. They are cheap, nearly silent and produce little heat because they have one less platter than most other drives.. And run them in a raid0 array. You deffinitely will not regret it.

 

[shinotenshi]

I have a 10k quantum atlas 4, its also 10k, it doesnt sound lound at all to me. but its all realive. i think the only other 10k drives are all scsi. i suppose you could always return it, if you think its too lound