Couple of Hard Drive Questions

[Rippy087]

I'm a noob when it comes to hard drives. I'm about to build my second system and it will be used primarily for high end gaming. I currently have a 120 gig Maxtor in my two year old system.

#1: How would I check how much space I have left on my current hard drive? (the ultra noob question)

#2: I have never had more than one hard drive, what are the advantages / disadvantages of running two hard drives in a RAID format, and what is the difference between RAID1 and RAID0?

#3: Everyone talks about how fast the Western Digital Raptor HD's are. What's so great about them? and would 74 gigs be enough or is it too small? Most people say they run them in RAID setups.
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822136033

#4: Does a faster hard drive affect performance in games? If not I think I will go with a Western Digital 250 gig.
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822144701

#5:If the speed in games and programs is affected by the hard drive speed, could I link the two hard drives together that I linked here?

Sorry bout the load of questions,
Jake

 

[karling07]

#1: Go into my computer, right click on C drive and look at the pie graph

#2: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks

#3: I personally don't notice the difference between 10,000RPM w/ SATAI as opposed to a 7,200 RPM on SATA 3GB/S

"What's so great" about raptors I guess is their RPM, but for me 74GB is not nearly enough. I usually use 200-250GB on my hard drive.

#4: It will affect it, but not noticeably for most games. That one you showed has SATA 3GB/s which is absolutely enough for any game

#5: Theres no need to; just get the second one and it will hold everything you need

 

[Computer Head]

You should go with a bigger hard drive, not just for space. You see, Windows uses a page file (used to be known as "virtual memory" in older OSes). Windows automatically determines the size of the page file based on the size of the drive. The bigger the page file, the faster the computer will perform in certain apps and while loading.