new system and old drives??

[orangezero]

here's what i'm about to setup.

opteron 144
dfi lanparty ultra d
2gb g.skill pc4000
evga 6800gs 256

obviously writing here, my question is about hard drives. so, what should i pair it with? never done raid, but now my board will. its a little confusing, you always get guys telling u that raid is way faster. i've read about the raptors and i was about to get a 36gb or even a 74gb raptor, but the increases don't seem that great.

right now i have tons of harddrives, although all are eide, ata, etc. some of my newest are 16mb 250gb maxtor drives, and a few 8mb 300gb seagate, probably the 7200.8, might be 9, not sure.

i had also thought of getting some cheaper 80gb drives and running raid, but dont' want to if it won't make much difference. i seem to remember that sata to ide won't make a huge difference, other than easier cabling in the box.

any ideas?

so just use my 250gb 16mb maxtor
raptor (150gb is too expensive for me now)
or raid some cheaper sata drives?

[TheDoucheMan]

Don't bother with raid. Go pick up a 74gig raptor (not 36) and call it a day. A raid0 array isn't any faster for regular desktop use, they are only faster with large file transfers. Plus if one disk in the array fails you lose all of the data, and if you want to build another computer later, chaces are you won't be able to transfer the array to the new setup.

Soooo... basically take the first choice with a 74gig raptor and your big maxtor.

[orangezero]

thanks for the help.

the reason i was thinking of raid is that i could pick up two 120gb, or 80gb sata drives for pretty cheap, and only put games and os on them. would end up being a little cheaper than a 74 raptor.

but u still think a 74 raptor is better than two raid drives?

[pj-schmidt]

a Raptor 74 is better than RAID and a Raptor 150 is even better than that. (For general usage)

If you're on a budget, just stick your fastest 7200 in there and call it a day, the performance increase with a raptor is not huge.

[orangezero]

ok, maybe i''ll just wait till i need more storage.
thansk