memory

[TRDCorolla1]

Don't have any money right now. I'm looking into getting that new Asus motherboard with the heatpipe cooling for it's chipsets.

You want the NCQ as a hard drive feature. It's fairly new and it helps enhance performance by speeding up access time of files. You want to make sure that both hard drives run the same speed too to prevent any incompatiblity. Raiding the 250GB would be nice. Tons of storage with added performance. It is expensive which is why I opt to Raid 2 80GB drives instead of 250GB. Cost too much for me. If you can afford it, it would be nice.

 

[EricM]

Raiding two 120gb drives is an option for me, but do i go with maxtor or seagate then since the wester digital dont have ncq?

 

[TRDCorolla1]

I don't think so. I'm looking for the specs on the western digital drives and can't see anywhere saying they have built in NCQ. I know for sure Seagates have them. I don't know about Maxtors either.

 

[EricM]

Ya i know the WDs dont have NCQ. But should I go with seagate or maxtor? I was reading something about RAID 0 and people think that it is not worth the extra money and you barely see an increase.

 

[TRDCorolla1]

The whole purpose of RAID 0 is for the performance gain no matter how big or small it may be. The increase may not be significant enough to justify all the extra cost which is why people aren't using RAID 0. It's like buying to big hard drives and you're only using one. I can see how it is a waste of money there. It's not like you're combining two 120GB drives together to get 240 GB hard drive. You're still using 120GB. RAID 1 on the other hand is what people are looking for, but it's slower. You have redundancy at that point. Complete backup on everything you do. It's like a mirrior image of the other drive, but I don't think you want that either. It's common to people who own businesses or have critical data they can't afford to lose.

I think for you, it's simple just to add a single hard drive for your PC. Two hard drives get complicated anyways and performance may be small as you have mentioned.

I actually like this hard drive:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA NCQ 3Gb/s ST3160812AS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148105

 

[EricM]

Wait so raiding two 100gb hard drives does not gibe you 200gb??? Im a bit confused. And thats the drive I was thinking of. That our a maxtor but I do not know which one is better. And when a drive says stuff like. 8.9MS what does that mean? Ive seen some with 11ms. Is that seek time? So is lower better?

 

[TRDCorolla1]

Nope. Just 100GB. Those numbers must be access times or something like that. The lower the number, the better. I'm going to try that Seagate one next time. It looks fast. I have to make sure the motherboard supports NCQ also to take advantage of the speed.

 

[EricM]

Ok then how does raid 0 work? And is there a huge diff between 8mb of cache and 16?

 

[TRDCorolla1]

I don't think there is like a huge difference between 8 and 16MB of cache. Just a little. I like the big cache. Just like how I love Toledo's X2 core. More cache. Cache RAM has a problem in which it is very costly to implement. That is why most hardware with a lot of cache tend to cost so much. At the same time, cache is very fast RAM too, so that's good.

RAID 0 takes two identical drives and treat them as one drive. Physically, they're two drives, but logically, it's just one drive. Data is broken up and split between the two for faster transfer.

 

[EricM]

Im still trying to figure out the NCQ stuff. Is the increase in performance noticeable? Ive read bad reviews on the Maxtor Diamond Max 10, so I am not sure I will go with that. My other option is the seagate u showed me but it only has 8mb of cache compared to 10. Or i could go with the WD without the NCQ. I still dont know if the board i picked supports NCQ it doesnt say on their site so I am not sure how to enable it.