Hard drives Q's

[j0lly r0ger]

I am looking at a new HD.

Unsure about getting a 7200 or a 10K RPM drive.
I play alot of games and do some vid editing.

Also can SOMEONE explain what does RAID 0 mean ?????
Walk me through it a bit please............

[Train]

Raid
http://www.overclockercafe.com/Articles/RAID/
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/...eLevel0-c.html

Rpm, the faster the better for bootup, opening of programs, etc.

[David Harrison]

I rather like this site's description of RAID. No nonsense, no frills, just the basic facts of what it is and then some suggested uses.

With a RAID-0 setup, you have an increased chance of losing data compared to if you just used 1 drive, because with RAID-0, if any drive in the array goes you lose everything.

Personally I think that Raptors cost far too much for only a little performance benefit, so if you want value for money, the Seagate Barracudas are pretty good performers and so is the Maxtor DiamondMax range.

[SuperSparks]

Also, be aware that RAID0 (striped) arrays can vary in performance tremendously depending on the chipset used. In some cases you can get all the disadvantages of greater risk of data loss without any worthwhile benifit at all.

Chipset SATA & RAID Performance Comparison

[hacker_cracker]

I'm using a 7200rpm drive, and all of my games run smooth. If anything, the CD-Rom is the weakest link when it comes to loading games. 10,000rpm drives are best for servers, in which a lot of data has to be accessed simultaniously. Raid-0 will give you a performance boost, but is not fault tolerant, so if you choose to go that route, back up your data regularly. Raid-5 is better, b/c you get the performance boost, and fault tolerance. For Raid-5 you will need 3 hard drives (minimum). All in all, Raid configs work best for SCSI drives, which makes it very expensive to implement. If you mainly just do games and video editing, I woulden't even worry about using Raid arrays.

[j0lly r0ger]

Thanks for the info guys, dont know what speed drive I am going to get yet. But it looks as thought RAID-0 is not a option anymore.

[David Harrison]

If anything, the CD-Rom is the weakest link when it comes to loading games.

Games now will totally install to the hard drive and only check for the prescence of the CD, I prefer to just get no-CD cracks though because it saves me the fuss of having to reach for the disc.

10,000rpm drives are best for servers, in which a lot of data has to be accessed simultaniously.

15,000rpm actually, and specifically the Maxtor Atlas 15K II. But SCSI drives tend to do worse than PATA/SATA drives in single user applications.

j0lly r0ger, the chances are that if your motherboard has onboard RAID, it'll only be RAID-0 or RAID-1, therefore to setup a RAID-5 array you would need a separate controller card. So you could either go for RAID-5 which would give you a performance benefit and redundancy, but at an increased cost. Or you could go for RAID-0, which would have some performance benefit, but no redundancy. Or you could go for RAID-1, which has redundancy, and the performance could be increased by buying bigger drives which have a higher density platters.

Therefore out of all those I'd recommend RAID-1, perhaps 2 * Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 300GB. It will give you a lot of space, reasonably good performance and redundancy, all at a fairly reasonable price. Out of the three options it's probably the best compromise of all the factors, but it really depends on how much you want to spend.

[hacker_cracker]

I didn't know 15k RPM drives were out now. I need to get with the times! SCSI drives are slower than SATA, but then to be built tougher, and can withstand the rigors of RAID longer than SATA drives. For home use, though, you can get by using SATA drives for your RAID array.