Cheap replacement for WD Raptors?

[InorganicMatter]

Rig in sig.

Long story short, this is a company computer they let me use at home. On the plus side, it's a free computer. On the minus side, if they need parts it usually comes out of my system. They need my Raptors . In return they are offering me some 160GB Seagate 7200.7 drives. Should I:

Take 4 Seagates, Dual RAID-0
or
Buy a sub-$100 7200RPM SATA drive with 16MB of cache, NCQ, and all that new stuff. Use this drive as my games/apps drive, and a 160GB Seagate as my Windows drive (which only has Windows and the pagefile).

Which one would get me better performance? I'm willing to spend up to $100

 

[unhappy_mage]

if you can do 0+1, that's my suggestion. performance plus speed. a new ncq etc. drive will be fast, but depending on what you do 0+1 can gain you a bit.

 

[kush]

Take the 4 Seagate drives - esp. if they're free to you . Whether or not to run dual RAID0 if debatable though..After having both of my formerly RAID0 WD SE's die within about a month of each other, I'm hesitant to do it again.

Perhaps think of checking out a discrete RAID card and going RAID5? Performance may/may not be as good as, say a RAID0 setup, but it would give you a certain measure of safety over even cloning from one stripe set to the other..

[edit] nix the RAID card I guess - didn't notice the "up to $100" part. RAID 0+0 if you're religious w/ your backups, 0+1 for a measure of safety.

 

[InorganicMatter]

I don't think RAID 5 or 0+1 is an option, as two of my SATA ports are on the chipset, and two are on a Silicone Image controller. Thus, my idea of dual RAID-0, or maybe a RAID-0 game drive and a RAID-1 Windows/Pagefile/Personal Documents drive. The "storage drive" in my sig is actually a Music/Movies/Warez drive, so that is not an issue.

You really think that 2x of the Seagate 7200.7 drives will be faster than a 16MB cache Western Digital SE drive? Not complaining, I just find it hard to believe.

 

[unhappy_mage]

Hmm. I think that the WDSE will be faster, especially with regard to seek times, but the cost of the 7200.7s make them an attractive option. 0+1 is almost definitely out; it's possible to have two raid 1 arrays joined in software raid 0, but I imagine that's a pain to deal with. Maybe a raid 1 array for better read speeds from the array? Another option to consider, anyways.