2nd Hard Drive

[mini_2003]

i have a 160gb western digital hd right now and im thinking of getting a 2nd harddrive and slaving my 160. Im looking for a fast hard drive to put all my programs, games and OS on , and then use the 160 as storage.
Ive been looking at the 74gb raptor but its $200 and thats a bit too expensive. What other good hard drives are there that i can buy.
thanks

 

[Kage]

Well the Raptors that much because of the 10,000RPM motor speed making things load faster, etc.

Other hard drives run at 7,500RPM, and is the standard at the moment, and most people are fine with it.

Your right in saying the Raptor is expensive though, since you don't get that much space either...

If I were you, I'd go with a trusted make, running at the standard 7,500RPM and use that, and worry more about space, unless the extra speed is really needed (dont know how much faster 10,000RPM models are)

 

[mini_2003]

i was just looking at the 36.7gb raptor, and the price isn't bad its just that is 36.7 enough for games and os and software?
this one is $110

or if not can you recomend a good 7500rpm hdd

thanks

 

[Kage]

Hmm, well, its enough for the OS, and a few games yes, but you will run into the fact that games do take up alot of space nowadays and even though they might load faster, you'll run out of space pretty quickly.

To have the speed increases though, you'd basically have to use the 36gb raptor for all your games, because running them off the 160gb one won't give any speed improvments, and so, wouldn't this drive become useless for most tasks?

Think though of each game now taking up about 2-4GB of space on your drive. The OS should only use about 2GB though.

They also say though that the games should stay seperate from the OS drive, and so you know what i'd do? I'd use the 36GB raptor for games, and the 160GB for your OS, software, documents, and music. That should give you more room, and you should get a speed boost from games.

Its entirely up to you though which way you do it, but having them seperate from each other makes fixing things alot easier afterwards without wiping both the games and OS.

I hope this helps

 

[Half Evil]

one thing you could do is if you have a high speed USB port on your mobo you can always thinkg about getting an external hard drive. I have no idea how fast an internal hard drive is so this could be a very bad idea. But it might be something to look into

 

[Kage]

Hmm, if a Firewire port is available, this can be quite fast also, and USB is only worth using if its a USB 2.0 port since 1.0 is useless for drives.

I wouldn't advise this though really, since a good internal drive is usually best for storing games, though an external drive is great for storing documents, etc which you might want to port to another machine

To tell the truth though, this is what I'd do.

I'd have that 160gb drive running as slave with a smaller drive for OS and vital programs, followed by the 160GB drive for Documents, Programs and Games, as this will one, speed up Windows loading since it won't have anything else clogging up the smaller drive,
and two,
will leave your files safe if you ever need to wipe the OS drive if any errors occur, so that worrying factor never comes into play

An External Firewire/USB 2.0 drive would then come in handy though (a third drive) if you wanted for storing files you never want to lose, and can back these up then rather easily (Music, Documents).

 

[Half Evil]

or would it be possible for him to get a 320 gig drive with the RAID 0 config. Because i think that config has two 160 gb drives, and ti stores half the data to one drive and the other half to the other drive. And this makes for double the load times so this would be a great idea for game's, and the other 160 gb drive would be saved for the OS critical system info ect... But this is assuming that i am thinking of the right thing. Because i have never actually studyed this. But this could also be something to look into.

 

[Kage]

i think RAID actually copies the same data onto both drives for backup purposes, though both drives have to be the same for this to work. Something to do with arrays.
I did make a thread about it, but I've forgotten what I said now.
Might be worth looking into again, huh?

 

[Computergen1]

No kage that would be a specific type of raid also known as a Matrix Raid. Which in my mind is a waste of space. I also am getting another hard drive. I will be getting a 120GB Seagate Barracuda in addition to my 80GB Samsung....200GB of storage= ME HAPPY .

I will not be forming a raid though.

 

[Kage]

Okay, never heard of that before

I do know though that different sizes of drive don't work together for RAID purposes...

I'm going to look up RAID now, as it doesn't seem to make sense until you do again, hehe.

Ahah: EDIT:

Short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers but aren't generally necessary for personal computers.

# Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.
# Level 1 -- Mirroring and Duplexing: Provides disk mirroring. Level 1 provides twice the read transaction rate of single disks and the same write transaction rate as single disks.
# Level 2 -- Error-Correcting Coding: Not a typical implementation and rarely used, Level 2 stripes data at the bit level rather than the block level.
# Level 3 -- Bit-Interleaved Parity: Provides byte-level striping with a dedicated parity disk. Level 3, which cannot service simultaneous multiple requests, also is rarely used.
# Level 4 -- Dedicated Parity Drive: A commonly used implementation of RAID, Level 4 provides block-level striping (like Level 0) with a parity disk. If a data disk fails, the parity data is used to create a replacement disk. A disadvantage to Level 4 is that the parity disk can create write bottlenecks.
# Level 5 -- Block Interleaved Distributed Parity: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Level 5 is one of the most popular implementations of RAID.
# Level 6 -- Independent Data Disks with Double Parity: Provides block-level striping with parity data distributed across all disks.
# Level 0+1 – A Mirror of Stripes: Not one of the original RAID levels, two RAID 0 stripes are created, and a RAID 1 mirror is created over them. Used for both replicating and sharing data among disks.
# Level 10 – A Stripe of Mirrors: Not one of the original RAID levels, multiple RAID 1 mirrors are created, and a RAID 0 stripe is created over these.
# Level 7: A trademark of Storage Computer Corporation that adds caching to Levels 3 or 4.
# RAID S: EMC Corporation's proprietary striped parity RAID system used in its Symmetrix storage systems.

Took from:
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html