I currently have a Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB Serial ATA II 7200RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer in my saved shopping cart for $94.00 I was really thinking about dropping it off and getting 2 Western Digital Caviar SE WD1200JS 160GB Serial ATA II 7200RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer and running them RAID0 $73.00 each Would the extra $ really be worth it? Has anyone had any bad experiances with RAID0 before?
if your going to get a raid why dont you hold out that slight bit longer and get 2 of those 250gb drives instead, ittl only be another $40 and youll have 500GB of space rather than 320
I'm using the nforce 4 chipset with raid0 although on a different board. It is very stable so far. I have however had plenty of problems with raid 0 with the raid failing and needing to be re-built, you can normally do this without destroying the data, but sometimes it can mean a new build and any data not backed up elsewhere will be lost for good. Most of my problems were with via raid controllers, or disks failing. If you are happy to backup data elsewhere which should be normal practice anyway, and are okay with doing a rebuild when needed, then I would say do for it. My general usage on PCmark05 for HDD is 16MB per second, although I am using raptors, but raid0 is quicker. If you also support raid5 on your board maybe look at that instead.
You lost me at re-build. I know how to set it up and stuff are you talking reformat and reinstall OS and programs and such?? Oh, and honestly, I can't think of why I need 320G's of space. I have 120 right now, and have about 15 free, I guess I might need alot if I install alot of games, but 320 sure sounds like enough to me!
To be honest, unless you're desperate for that little bit extra performance, I'd stick with a single 250. RAID0 when it works is great, but it can incur too many problems to be worth it for the average user. The ideal setup nowadays is a standard hard disk for data and a small raptor for system loading. A bit more expensive than a RAID option, but safer, faster and more secure.
Yes I meant re-format etc... As far as what space you need, then I would have suggested that you just adjust the size of the disks bought to give you the total drive space required, but was pointing out that you had more than one option open to you and with the raid 5 you have both performance and reliability. I still use most of my disk space even with what I have, thats with a standalone 160GB SATA and a 200GB IDE drive on top as well, but I keep all my software, PC/Playstation games and a lot of commercial and home made films backed up as well.
Okay, I'm having a HD war. NCQ got me thinking. Well nowhere can I find whether or not they have NCQ... The Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 300Gb HDD boasts the NCQ feature. So since I can't find NCQ on any WD SE16 HDD, even on their website, does that mean they don't support it? Or it is just so common they don't need to say it?
Found something interesting out there for all you WD fans. Kinda crappy to me. I just changed to Seagate.
Well not necessarily, there are other ways of getting higher speed than NCQ, and it would indeed reduce sequential performance. Afaik Samsung don't use NCQ and they're about the best hard drives money can buy.
Ignore sammorris when he says he used up 360 gigabytes of space. I know him personally, and he's always P2P-ing! It's addictive! If you use your hard drive sensibly, uninstall games when you know that you're never really going to play them again, and refrain from installing software 'because you can' then not only will you require less space, but you will have a faster system. If you look at benchmarks of any hard drive, you will see that the graph for performance against capacity used is a distinct curve. As more space is used on the drive, the transfer speed diminishes slowly at first, and then very rapidly decreases. Look here if you don't believe me!: http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/04/27/samsung/page5.html I agree with him as far as RAID is concerned. I use RAID0, and have never had any problems, but then i ensured my drives were reliable before creating a RAID array. For the average PC user, RAID is probably too much to worry about setting up correctly, and a nightmare if fatal difficulties are incurred. Take his advice, DO get multiple drives, but don't RAID them, and just sort your data into them accordingly. Hope this helps....
Addictive or otherwise, most of the people i seem to know download this that and the other, and you'd be surprised how much a hard disk starts filling up when you download movies, games etc. It's easy to leave stuff on the hard drive thinking it's "more reliable", but i've had more hard drive problems than DVD problems so far, so just get a DVD writer, buy a big spindle of DVD+Rs and a carry case, and you have up to 470GB of space, for a fraction of the cost. Less speed and write-once only admittedly, but it leaves your hard disks free and fast!
Yeah, one of my main uses for my computer is backing up dvd's, scanning, printing, and lightscribe. I always appreciate the good torrent as well, but yeah, most ISO files I actually burn to a CD/DVD just to free up space. I'm just "flabbergasted" (ha, what a word) in the search for the affordable/performance solution... I did this week long hunt for a video card as well. I just can't justify spending more than 100 bucks for a Raptor, but it seems like such a good idea! One question about running a Raptor for system files... Those that do, what about games? I have 2 drives and most I can make install to my secondary HD, but a few I can't? How does this work with the Raptor/Storage config??
Raptors don't differ from other drives in terms of what will be allowed to be put on them, really. Though they may be expensive, you'll be loading windows FAR faster than before. What I suggest is just installing XP, maybe Office and the programs that have to be put on the master disk on the raptor, leaving it over 50% free (and defragmenting it weekly) and then install/shove everything else on the other drive. You'll be amazed how fast the computer will run.
