Newbie's first build (revised) plz help with compatibilty!

[EnderW]

r the warantee (oem or retail) the same on WD?
i was looking at th wd raptors:
check it out:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-144-366&depa=1

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-144-160&depa=1


the only reason i was in doubt, is because two days ago i just made a post regarding CPUs, and people say retail AMD have 3 year warantee, while OEM only 1

Retail CPUs usually have longer warranties then their OEM counterparts, but on hard drives, the opposite is often true. Also, there is little price difference between Retail and OEM on CPUs, whereas there can be a signifcant price difference on hard drives.

Most WD desktop drives have a 1 year warranty on Retail packages and a 3 year warranty on OEM drives.
The Raptor is considered an enterprise drive and has a 5 year warranty on both.
http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp

All of Seagates desktop drives have a 5 year warranty.
http://info.seagate.com/mk/get/AMER_WARRANTY_0704_JUMP

Maxtor and Hitachi have different policies.
http://maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxto...us/Support/Warranty Services/Warranty Periods
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/warranty/english.htm

Bottom line, buy an OEM drive. And learn how to use Google - took me all of 5 minutes to find this information.

yah, i've also heard about raptors being considerably louder than normal ones, althought i am not sure exactly HOW MUCH louder it will be.

or perhaps there are alternatives? i've heard about some RAID thingy, not really sure what it is, all i heard is that it makes something faster. maybe 2 hard drives 7200rpm with raid would be the same speed as raptor 10000rpm?

Raptors aren't much louder then normal drives. You can see here how it compares to a couple of 7200 RPM units, the Hitachi 7K250 and the older version of the WD2500JD.

RAID0 doesn't provide a great deal of performance increase for most single user enviroments.
http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=SingleDriveVsRaid0
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

You will see some benefits when editing large video files, etc, but often you can get similiar results by just using to seperate disks without RAID0. RAID0 also doubles your risk of data loss, since if any of the drives in the array go down, you lose all the data.

RAID0 is only one type of RAID. There are many different types, each with their own advantages/disadvantages. You can read all about them here.

 

[jacuzz1]

If you want faster load times and whatnot get a Raptor, I don't think I've ever heard of anyone saying they're unbearably louder, just slightly more so when seeking. The hassle of setting up RAID isn't worth it for every day use and games, particulary to someone that's new to it and will potentially have trouble configuring it optimally. The performance gains are not there from all the tests I've seen, a Raptor will be a much easier spped upgrade.

Well there is no real hassle , its a key stroke to get to raid config and then its intuitive form there. If you can install an os , you can setup a raid array.