Well it is time for me to upgrade my hard drive. My system is pretty fast (2400+ scores for DX10 heaven benchmark v2.1) and I am having some trouble finding the right Hdd for my needs. I have a few things I need with a new HDD: high capacity (1+ tb minimum), and high speed. I was looking at the velociraptor 600gb and running 2 in raid 0 (almost too expensive). But then I saw this Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...TC-Froogle-_-Hard+Drives-_-Seagate-_-22148506 and thought it looked like a much better bargain. The only thing I was worried about was something called a SATA III controller, which this drive needs apparently. And I am not sure what that is. I have a x58 motherboard but I do not know if SATA III is in it. I found a bunch of SATA III controllers out there but they look like they are for older mother boards and plug into a pci slot. Any help on choosing a new HDD that can keep up with my system would be GREATLY appreciated.
a sata3 drive is backwards compatible with sata1 controllers. check your motherboard manual or userguide to see which version of sata controller you have.
Board: Alienware 04VWF2 A00 I'm looking for a users manual but am having a hard time finding anything. I may have to contact the Alienware and have them send me a copy. Don't know if it will help any but here is what I am getting from Belarc: Main Circuit Board Board: Alienware 04VWF2 A00 Serial Number: ------------- Bus Clock: 133 megahertz BIOS: Alienware A04 10/28/2009 I will contact support and get try to get those tech specs.
That is in the spec, but it isn't the case in reality. Many sata controllers won't even work with sata2 drives...that is why all the early sata2 drives had that sata1 jumper on them. ...And the manual won't help here; not one sata1 controller actually met sata1 specs, yet they all just used sata1 specs for the manuals. Go ahead and check...I bet it says that the controller supports 48bit drives too.
I am almost positive that the Barracuda XT will fit and function in my system. I just want to be sure that I will be able to take advantage of the 6.0Gb/s transfer speed. Here is some more on my motherboard I found on some other forums...somebody said the mother board is almost exactly like the ASUS p6t board, but I only have 4 storage slots instead of 6 that I know of. My board is titled as: Alienware Approved Intel® X58 MicroATX The ASUS that is said to be like my board is: Asus p6t http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=QtpKQuERkuYw6trc The ASUS only supports 3.0Gb/s. But I don't know if my mother board will do the 6.0Gb/s speed. If it is the case that my machine will only handle 3.0Gb/s what would be some HDD options that I could look at.
I have news for you...you are not going to get 6.0Gb/s out of the drive anyway. The fastest platter drives can't even make full use of 3.0Gb/s connections...and the Barracuda XT really isn't a very fast platter drive. Sure, you might get the occasional spike of data once in a while if you are on 6.0Gb/s connections...but you will need benchmark software to notice any difference at all. Overclocking your ram by 10MHZ would do more for performance than switching the drive from 3.0Gb/s to 6.0Gb/s. You might wonder why they would make such a drive...they make such drives because people buy them.
OK, I think I can make this a little easier. I found my exact HDD in my system so hopefully I can find a faster HDD compared it to the the one currently installed. My HDD is a: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500418AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148395 Yeah I know I will never get 3Gb/s but I was under the impression that the HDDs that use the 6Gb/s interface are much faster than the 3Gb/s. (although an actual 6Gb/s drive would be pretty amazing wouldn't it, o' well, some day I hope) And by overclocking my ram do you mean my installed DDR3 ram, because that is already running at 1333mhz. Maybe I'm not understanding what you are referring to. Sorry but my experience in performance computing is pretty much limited to CPU and GFX card overclocking and related stuff, which I'm not too bad at (planning to clock my CPU to 4ghz soon, I can't wait to try it out and see what I get). But this is my first foray into the world of performance HDDs. Thanks a bunch for the help guys, I was pulling my hair out trying to figure this stuff out.
The model is: Alienware Aurora 00 (whatever that means). But I'm not too sure how much that will help. Almost every single component is upgradable so it would be hard to tack it down to 1 "make and model" Alienware more than likely has some classification system that they are using for the exact system configuration that I chose but it is probably impossible to find it. I did however find out that the Seagate Barracuda tx drive I originally was wondering about IS backwards compatible with 3.0gb/s and even 1.5gb/s just like you said. http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/desktops/barracuda_xt/#tTabContentSpecifications But looking at some benchmarks it seems that the western digital caviar black is faster. I could slap 2 of these 1tb drives in a RAID 0 config and crush the Seagate For less the cost. http://techreport.com/articles.x/15363/1 http://www.anandtech.com/show/2866/2
RAID 0 is very unreliable; and software RAID 0 is worse. Don't store anything on it...and make sure to backup things like favorites, email, etc frequently if you put your OS on there.
