New build, new storage?

A

Atheist

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 27, 2005
Messages
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I'm going to be upgrading the core of my system (CPU, motherboard, RAM) in the next month or two and I'm thinking about getting a new HDD. Here's what I have:
C: 36GB Raptor (SATA)
D: 250GB MaxPlus II (PATA)
E: 300GB Samsung (PATA)

I've noticed that hard drives more recent than mine have substantially higher throughput than my drives; each of mine gets about 51MB/s reads.

My new system's motherboard will have 1 IDE connector, so I thought I'd put my DVD drives on that and get at least one new SATA HDD. I like having a boot drive and a data+apps drive. I'm thinking about the WD 640GB Black or a 1TB disk - I saw recently that Seagate has a 2 500GB platter 1TB drive. I'm not really interested in SSDs right now.

Would there be much of an improvement in boot times and other performance by putting my OS on a newer, higher throughput but perhaps lower seek time drive?
 
Buy the following:

1 more Raptor
2 640GB (or bigger) SATA drives

RAID 1 the raptor drives and RAID 1 the 640GB drives. Take your old PATA drives, copy new files onto 640GB RAID, then take a blowtorch to them, good riddance.

Install your OS on the raptors, all applications on the bigger one. 7200rpm is bloody fast enough for almost anything.
 
Short answer, yes, definitely get new storage. Get either two WD Caviar Black 640GB or 1TB drives (depending how much space you need). They will be noticeably faster than the Raptor you have now, and blow the PATA drives away.
 
Matrix RAID 0 on (2) or (3) WD 640GB Blue's or Black's or 500GB Seagate 7200.12's.

The caveat being no RAID 0 for OS unless you have a good backup system.
 
I posted a thread with some benchmark numbers for my WD6401AALS. http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1412585
The new drive's average rate is almost 30MB/s faster than my Seagate, and over twice as fast as the temp drive. I'm sure there are plenty of benchmarks out there for this drive, but these really let me see how much faster it was than what I currently had. Its minimum is higher than the 40GB's maximum and pretty close to the 500GB's average, to put things in perspective.
Click to expand...

I think the 1TB Blacks are supposed to be about the same speed, if you need a little more room.
 
Bigdady92 said:
Buy the following:

1 more Raptor
2 640GB (or bigger) SATA drives

RAID 1 the raptor drives and RAID 1 the 640GB drives. Take your old PATA drives, copy new files onto 640GB RAID, then take a blowtorch to them, good riddance.

Install your OS on the raptors, all applications on the bigger one. 7200rpm is bloody fast enough for almost anything.
Click to expand...
wrong wrong wrong
that 36GB Raptor is probably a WD360GD, the first generation one which is slower than a modern day 2.5" 7200 RPM notebook drive

to the OP, get a single WD Black drive, I'd probably go with a 1TB, since the price/GB is about the same
the Raptor is basically worthless, too slow for OS/apps, too small for storage, sell if you can and put the money towards that 1TB over the 640GB
as for the PATA drives, I'd just put them in an external enclosure or something and use them for backups
 
EnderW said:
wrong wrong wrong
that 36GB Raptor is probably a WD360GD, the first generation one which is slower than a modern day 2.5" 7200 RPM notebook drive

to the OP, get a single WD Black drive, I'd probably go with a 1TB, since the price/GB is about the same
the Raptor is basically worthless, too slow for OS/apps, too small for storage, sell if you can and put the money towards that 1TB over the 640GB
as for the PATA drives, I'd just put them in an external enclosure or something and use them for backups
Click to expand...

QFT

I just replaced a 36 gig raptor a few months ago. It's only saving grace was it's fairly low access time. It's transfer speed was around 50 MB/sec.

You could prolly still sell it on ebay and make almost enough to buy a new WD 640.

Get a cheap external enclosure for one of your old drives to use for backup.

If you would like to make an even bigger jump in performance, then grab 2 and RAID 0 them.

Don
 
+1 for Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB as main drive for OS+apps.
 
Sounds good. Whatever I don't carry over in this upgrade will be shifted to other (older) rigs I have.

Edit: Yeah, the Raptor is a WD360GD.
 
EnderW said:
wrong wrong wrong
that 36GB Raptor is probably a WD360GD, the first generation one which is slower than a modern day 2.5" 7200 RPM notebook drive

to the OP, get a single WD Black drive, I'd probably go with a 1TB, since the price/GB is about the same
the Raptor is basically worthless, too slow for OS/apps, too small for storage, sell if you can and put the money towards that 1TB over the 640GB
as for the PATA drives, I'd just put them in an external enclosure or something and use them for backups
Click to expand...

QFT

I have nothing to add to that, because that is exactly what I would advise as well.
 
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