Help me decide!

C

Confusedsoul

n00b
Joined
Apr 26, 2005
Messages
60
Which harddrive/harddrives setup do I do? I use my computer mostly for gaming, web surfing, torrenting (mostly large files), DVD copying. BTW, most of my gaming is either FPS or racing simulations.

1 - WD4000KD WD 400GB SE16

2 - T7K250 Hitachi 250GB Sata 2 drives in RAID 0

2 - WD2500KS WD 250GB SE16 drives in RAID 0

2 - WD2500YD WD 250GB Raid Edition 16mb drives in RAID 0

So which setup would you go with? Please choose an option and if you want to say why you chose it, let me know. The prices of these options pretty much equal each other so that is not a factor!

I guess from what I hear the WD4000KD is the non-enterprise twin of the 400GB Raid Edition drive. Just tested less before the factory. If I knew RAID would benefit me over a single drive, then I wouldn't even consider going with just one drive. But since the price is about even for the 4 setups, I threw in the Hitachi's since they are very fast for single user desktops and applications it seems (according to StorageReview) and have the same warranty period as the desktop version of the WD's.
 
Option 1.

I've not seen many desktop, gaming systems that really benifit from raid 0. Either way if a drive dies you're out all your data, 1 single drive has a less change of failing than two drives though.
 
Well, see, I'm seeing differences. I see reviews where general usage and XP startup could be faster with RAID 0, gaming load times have decreased for certain games, with very minimal to no performance hit. So thats why I wonder. I don't really have any important documents on my computer at any given time, since most of the pictures i would want are on my fiance's computer as well.
 
Well opinions vary greatly on raid 0 in the forums here. Benchmarks don't mean anything really. They don't give real performance figures they just give an across the board way to compare components of a system.
 
I strongly suggest a single disk. In terms of performance, you're not going to see a whole lot of difference with your usage pattern - raid 0 helps most with reads or writes that are large and sequential. "[G]aming, web surfing, torrenting (mostly large files), [and] DVD copying" don't do that much. Torrenting, for example - that's about as far from sequential as you get ;) DVD copying isn't hard drive limited; you get less than 20 MB/s from a DVD drive, and a single disk handles that fine. Gaming is the only place where the game makers have a chance to do some really good sequential I/O, and according to mikeblas' traces of Farcry, they're not doing a good job of I/O.

 
I really like my 2500KS and use it the same way you plan to. I bought it before the 3200KS was released - you might look into that one instead.
 
Thanx, I found a decent deal on a 500gb WD SE16 that I'm going with.

500GB SATA 2 w/16mb cache, 7200RPM, 125GB platters for 230$ with Free shipping is pretty good right now! Thanx everyone!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top