How Big of a Hard Drive?

[cu2cool]

I use about 30-40 Gigs of space on my current hard drive for installed programs and Windows. I want to upgrade to two 10,000 RPM hard drives and run them in RAID 0 array, but they usually run a little pricey. The cheapest 10,000 RPM HD on Newegg.com is about $110 for ~36GB of space. The next biggest is 74GB, 150GB and so on. I think I should get the 150 GB just so I have extra room to install as many programs as I want freely. What do you guys think I should get?

[protias]

well, what are you going to be using the drive/computer for? i like having the extra space for my 150gb raptor, but i really dont need all that space (my other 2 computers have a total of 2.2TB :D). you should be good with a single 74gb raptor, but it does depend on what you use the drive for.

*stays away from the raid0 conversation part because it's beating the dead horse*

[Sparkyy]

Since you are only using 30-40 gb of space now, go for the 74gb Raptor, if you have the cash and want more space then opt for the 150gb Raptor. Just don't use RAID 0 because then you are opening yourself up to more problems should one of the drives crash.

[cu2cool]

I generally use it for gaming and surfing the net, but occaisionally I like to edit music,pix, and vids. Yea, I was thinkin the 74 GB would be good too. I was just worring that I mite need more room for bigger and better progs in the futture, or just to have more rom for virtual mem. About that crash possibility in raid 0, will it only F*** up the current things I'm working on or will it effect already saved stuff to?

[drizzt81]

About that crash possibility in raid 0, will it only F*** up the current things I'm working on or will it effect already saved stuff to?
it will fsck up everything that is stored on the raided harddrives.

[movax]

About that crash possibility in raid 0, will it only F*** up the current things I'm working on or will it effect already saved stuff to?Everything on those drives die. Some poor guy posted here earlier about recovering data on a RAID 0 array that went down, and he lost some real important stuff.

[cu2cool]

so would the safest bet be to run Raid 1+ 0? I heard there's a Raid 5, which is supposedly the best option.

[general]

1+0 would require 4 drives. Raid-5 spans the data over multiple discs so you are safe if one drive fails. Given that you're only doing this casually, I'd suggest get a Raptor as your main drive and make a RAID-1 array with some small cheap drives. You can then backup your main drive onto those and keep some data there as well. You will have downtime if the Raptor goes down, but you can easily restore once you get the drive replaced and your data will be safe.

[BillParrish]

you are using 40GB of 400GB SATA 3GBs currently installed storage. you have only 1GB of installed memory
and (imo) a POS power supply.


/shrug.

I suggest you get another GB of ram, will make twice the impact to the user experience than cutting 1 sec off of a games load time.

your board wont do raid 5 but if you blowing money on things you dont really need I guess it doesnt matter, controllers are not all that expensive, nice to be rich :D

[unhappy_mage]

Ouch. Buy a new power supply before you buy disks - that Rosewill 500W might just kill them before you get any use out of them.

Raid 5 as a boot disk is a bad idea. My suggestion is a single drive as a boot disk (Raptor 740ADFD would be a good choice if you have the budget for it) and then however many drives in raid 5 you want, for mass data storage.