Dedicated small boot drive versus ???

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needmorecarnitine

Supreme [H]ardness
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Feb 10, 2004
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Building a new computer and was thinking of using a small boot drive. I see lots of people recommending the 6400AAKS as a boot drive but I was thinking of buying a WD 1600AAJS for around $50~55 taxed/shipped.

This is my reasoning. I want three drives. Boot drive, my main drive (likely the 6400AAKS) and a terabyte drive as backup. Boot drive will only have windows and will occasionally be used as a target drive when other drives are being used. I mostly am on the net and download video (yes, porn :D) with pretty frequent decompression of rar and will likely get into video encoding. I plan to install programs on to the terabyte drive as I think that might quicken things up as it will be idling otherwise and there is a gonna be a significant difference in empty space vs the 640GB drive. I don't care that much about boot time because it will always be on.

Any other ideas on setting it up better for cheap? Not looking for any raptors and 640GB as a main drive is minimum plus a larger backup drive.
 
If you're not playing any games or doing anything disk intensive, just add another drive for good measure, run a single RAID 5 array, and call it a day. Or if you are, RAID 10 is quite nice.
 
I do light gaming, maybe 10 hours or so a month. That is why I was figuring to install programs/games on to the terabyte drive while the 640GB drive will be used for torrents/azureus. Azureus doesn't seem to use the cpu a lot, I will have 4GB of ram, so I think I should be able to keep uploading/downloading while gaming (single player mode of course, will be checking out routers with qos later)

and when the 640GB is filled up I would use the terabyte as the main and buy a 1.5GB or so for backup. Maybe I'm over analyzing it but I just don't want any disk related slowdown which I occasionally get with my current two drive setup
 
Personally, I'd setup another old box for downloading and let the primary workstation/gaming system do all of the other work.
 
I like to run a dedicated system drive just because it makes system recovery, backup, and configuration a lot easier. This is especially true if you are running software raid
 
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