Best SATA HD in RAID

[apopilot]

I am building a new PC for gaming but will also have MEDIA CENTER 2005 on it. What is the best way to set this up. I would like to have a seperate drive for gaming and dedicate the RAID side to the MEDIA CENTER SERVER. I will be using an ASUS A8N-DELUXE board.

 

[DougLite]

Most any brand will work just fine, with the exception of Western Digital's consumer drives. They have a firmware level error recovery mechanism that can cause problems with many RAID controllers. They have a 'RAID Edition' (WDxxxxSD model drives) that is significantly more expensive than their regular desktop drives. I'd get Hitachi 7K250/7K400 or Maxtor DiamondMax10/MaxLineIII (the 16MB buffer drives) for large volume, high performance storage. NCQ should not be that big of a deal on a media server with large sequential reads and writes. Check out my Buyer's Guide for more into on the strengths of each particular brand. Every major manufacturer has a recommended drive, but each one is recommended for a different objective/usage model. With respect to your RAID question specifically, most any drive should scale pretty well on a RAID system for the task of media storage, although I would put Seagate SATA drives or the aforementioned Maxtor drives near the top of your wishlist as the commerically available native SATA drives.

For your boot/gaming drive, WD740GD (the 73GB Raptor) is the fastest thing going barring an investment in SCSI.