Serious hard drive upgrade advice needed

M

msny

2[H]4U
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Sep 5, 2001
Messages
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I need some serious advice on upgrading my hard drives. I am a gamer and want more space for games like Doom 3 ect but my MP3 collection is growing also. This is one of my "interim" upgrades, I build new about every 2 years. Price and speed are my concerns
I think my video card is fine for another year.

My current three hard drive setup is:
1) Boot disk - Maxtor 40 gig, 2 mb buffer, IDE
2) Maxtor 40 gig, 2 mb buffer, IDE
3) 80 gig - WD WD800JB Special Edition 7200rpm, 8 mb buffer, 8.9 ms, IDE

Total 160

Drives 1 and 2 are connected to the standard IDE ports. Drive 3 is connected to the extra IDE. I have no SATA drives at all, and do NOT plan to raid.

New setup:
1) Boot Disk - Move the 80 gig drive above.
2) Western Digital 160GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive, Model WD1600JD, OEM Drive Only OR Western Digital 160GB 7200RPM IDE Hard Drive, Model WD1600JB, OEM Drive Only both at Newegg for about the same price.

Total 240 gigs

I would take the two remaining 40 gig drives and build a SFF in the fall. I'm concerned that IDE drives will be "obsolete" when buying a new MB in the future.

Question: Should I buy the SATA or IDE as my 2nd drive ? This is where all the games and music will be stored. I only install windows and window app on the boot disk. Motherboard and other info in my sig.

Thanks for your advice.
 
You might consider a dedicated storage solution with a redundant array (5) and gigbit LAN (100MB/s same as ATA100)
games that you typically use being local, but media and games not currently being used alot being remote
would be adaquate to stream any media and reasonable to transfer any large file
(like a game) then you could simply have a single performance drive locally or possibly 2 if you where doing something that employed the virtual memory heavily (graphics)

that is the solution Ive adopted, and is far safer (I still bakup) but the trick is a redundant parity array's efficiency increases with the number of drives, so
3 x 100GB = 200GB (minimum required for RAID 3 or 5)
5 x 100GB = 400GB
8 x 100GB = 700GB

IDE isnt going anywhere for a while yet and even then there will be IDE Contoller cards
 
hmm i think thats a little out of his price range.

hah your in boulder? i graduated from CU. I'm wearing an Illegal Pete's shirt right now.
 
sativa said:
I'm wearing an Illegal Pete's shirt right now.
Click to expand...

LOL, now if youd been wearing an Oasis Tshirt Id likely have designed it :p
 
You might consider a dedicated storage solution with a redundant array
Click to expand...

As I said I'm not raiding, and YES that is overkill.

The orginial question is simply: IDE or SATA drive from my setup above ?
 
Like Ice Czar said " IDE isnt going anywhere for a while yet and even then there will be IDE Contoller cards " But if you are afraid about not being able to use it down the road then just go with the sata hard drive. I personally still prefer ide but I guess that because I have been using it for years.
 
msny said:
that is overkill.
Click to expand...

LOL

you say that now
but really its not considering youll soon have so many different HDD in more than one location

consider
1. Linux software RAID price $0 > $? if you insist W2K\XP software RAID5
2. 2x Gigabit LAN cards what? $60?
3. some cable

additional benefits, reduced heat in the HTPC (assumed SSF?)
easy backup from a dedicated server, could even be an old K6 :p

so your arguement that as a solution its either too expensive or overkill isnt really valid
you still might not want to do it, but consider it before you dismiss it


regarding HDDs, most brands in my experience and from empirical data here are nearly equally reliable (let the games begin :p) each equally sharing fanboys
most reliability issues I feel can be traced to integration shipping and handling

Which Brand of Hard Drive is Most Reliable? & Proper Handling Guide

So I buy drives based on price, performance and warranty

both PATA and SATA have potential issues that need to be verified when implemented

for indepth metrics and the PATA vs SATA differences see > As the Disc Spins

Good Luck ;)
 
you might try raid 1 for your boot drive with the 2 40's rather than one 80. less capacity, but redundant. you won't lose stuff if a disk dies. i know you said no raid, but this isn't raid0, which is the one with terrible cost/performance. raid1 has advantages.

i would get a sata drive now. the 200 gb seagate sata's are $135 or so on newegg as we speak, and a sata controller card will only be $20 or so. a 4way promise card for hardware raid5 wouldn't be a bad thing, in case you decide to expand to raid5 later. I think this problem is going to get more and more widespread, and raid5 is the best solution.
 
You may think about getting a SATA Raptor for your OS/ Games drive and a big (200-250 Gig) IDE dive for your music.
Thats similar to the old trick of useing a scsi drive for your os and an ide for data.

Luck...... :D
u=Tigerbiten.gif
 
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