Choosing Hard Drives

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SolidSnakeUS

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 29, 2008
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Originally, I was thinking of buying one 300GB Velociraptor and 2 WD 640GB's in RAID 0 for new storage for my computer. But I have been thinking, how about if I get 3 WD 640GB's, make 2 of them RAID 0 and then take the other one and RAID it with my other SATA drive (Seagate 320GB Perp Record) for the main drive. Would that be a better idea then spending the extra cash for the Velociraptor? I know I have to buy 2 external enclosures for the 2 IDE drives in my computer so they become externals. But I feel for the money, the 3 640's seem better? Any comments or suggestions?
 
I personally can't justify spending that much money on the velociraptor, but maybe someone can be persuasive.
 
"How fast is fast?"

It's a question I ask quite often and no one ever gives me a satisfactory answer, so I keep asking it. :p One could argue that the money for the VelociRaptor will sure disappear fast when you commit to the purchase, that much is a given. But I guess to answer your question one would have to understand what you're looking for in your system.

Obviously the VelociRaptor will be the fastest single drive you can get (physical hard drive), but then again you're thinking about doing a RAID 0 with the 640GB drives which obviously will stomp the VelociRaptor in sheer transfer speeds when they're set up properly. Access times will always be won by the VelociRaptor as well.

Doing a mutant RAID between a third 640GB and that Seagate 320? That won't work very well in the long run, I'd say.

I don't see an actual question I can answer because I don't see a goal in mind. The most storage? The fastest machine? That sort of thing... clarify what you want and then I/we can provide an answer based on that...
 
I agree with what Joe Average said, but I also want to add what about reliability? I never go for these expensive fast drives because I always think they run much faster, generate more heat and might die much sooner than a regular drive.

For me I always choose space over speed. I seem to always run out of space but I have never really ran into a situation where I said if only this thing could access my data a few milliseconds faster I'd spend more money to fix that.
 
Ok, I can say that I do not have the greatest amount of money, but I would like to know what is best for the money (price/performance/storage). From what you guys are saying, the WD 640's are probably better for the money because the performance is really good (better than the Raptors from what I've read), larger and cheaper than the Velociraptor. So I guess I will be going with at least 3 WD 640's then. However, do you think I should just leave one 640 as the main drive, the 320 GB as extra storage and also 2 640's in RAID 0 as extra storage?

So it would look like this:

WD 640GB (Main Drive)
Seagate 320GB (Storage)
2 WD 640GB in RAID 0 (Storage)

Does that sound good or does anyone have suggestions?
 
SolidSnakeUS said:
So it would look like this:

WD 640GB (Main Drive)
Seagate 320GB (Storage)
2 WD 640GB in RAID 0 (Storage)

Does that sound good or does anyone have suggestions?
Click to expand...

That looks good, you'll have the peppy fast/new drives as your main drive, and a striped set, with the slightly older, 320 giger as add'l storage. Just note that you have 0 protection on your RAID 0 array, one drive goes bad/faulty, all 1.2 ish terabytes goes bad. So be sure not to store mission critical stuff on there.
 
More than likely, it will become a huge main drive for me, maybe I should keep the super important stuff for me on the Seagate, such as my music, documents (backs up from main drive) and anime/TV shows/movies, which would probably take up most of the drive. When it comes to software I have downloaded, I could just get them redownloaded again. I mean, this is the largest amount of space I would ever have for my computer, I mean, one 640GB is larger than all the hard drives in my desktop.

This is my current hard drive layout:

1 Maxtor 80GB 8MB Cache (Over 4 years old)
1 Maxtor 160GB 8MB Cache (Over 4 years old)
1 Seagate 320GB 16MB Cache
1 External WD 250GB 8MB Cache (Over 2 or 3 years old)

So yeah, this will be faster and larger than I've ever had before. When the new drives get put in, I will probably have about 2.5TB worth of drive space, which is awesome for the money.

Another suggestion I was thinking of was maybe JBOD for the 640 and 320? Just a thought.
 
My apologies for the double post, I know I shouldn't do these, but I do have another question.

Would it be better if instead of doing RAID 0 for the 2 640's, should I do RAID 1, so it can mirror the drives just in case one fails?
 
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