Small and quick HD recommendation

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bennieboy2290

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 7, 2007
Messages
79
So I'm looking for a Hard drive solution for my new build. Basically, storage isn't really a concern, speed is more important. The PC will be used primarily for gaming, but I rarely have more than a couple games at a time on my PC. For example, currently, my drive for my OS and games/programs is only 70GB and I haven't had trouble with running out of space on it. I also have a larger storage drive (200GB, I may keep this for my new build as well) that I also haven't filled up, as well as an external drive.

I have thought about 2 74GB raptors in RAID 0, but many people say that it is a waste of money. The WD AAKS single platter drives look great and I was possibly thinking of doing 2 of those in RAID 0, but 640 GB is a lot of storage for me. I don't mind having an extra half TB of storage if those drives really are fast, I just figured that smaller older drives might be faster? If the size of the drives don't have an effect on speed, then size doesn't matter to me.
 
RAID 0 has it's place, but since it doubles the cost, is a little slower on access time, and you don't need the space then I'd suggest a single drive with very fast access time.

A single Raptor 150 is what it sounds like you are looking for.

A single 320gb WD AAKS would be my second choice.
 
+1 on single Raptor 150 - excellent access time and high sequential transfer rate
 
wow I always thought that RAID 0 made everything faster. Just out of curiosity, what is it used for then?

And thanks for the suggestions. 1x 150GB Raptor it is then.
 
The downside of RAID 0 with any controller you're likely to have and use is that the controller has overhead that cuts into the access time. But once you overcome that overhead then it's all gravy. The problem is that Windows and most apps are a bunch of small files, so each time you have to deal with that overhead to access a file. RAID 0 likes less files that are bigger, so video editing guys love RAID 0.

All that said, there still is a net benefit in performance of RAID 0 in most cases. It's been argued to death about how much that net can can be, or is in reality. But the downside of a drive failure or the controller having a hiccup (I've had both) is an issue. To most of us that have dealt with RAID 0 and had to recover from a failure get tired eventually of running RAID 0 and decide it's not worth the potential hassle.

Also, we're being asked for advice from people that we don't really know what their skill level is. Will RAID be too hard for them to deal with? Will they know to load the drivers (the "F6 thing")? Will I want to catch the grief in a month or a year when they have a RAID failure and they weren't backing up their data. Now they're pissed at me because they lost their data. It goes on, the balance between what we interpret your technical ability to be and overbloated expectations that RAID 0 will double system performance.
 
We've used these 16GB SSD's at work for our highspeed work stations--> SUPER TALENT FSD16GC25M 2.5" 16GB SATA Internal Solid state disk (SSD) They're pretty pricey at 400 ish, but SSD's are soo fast. We found that using them for linking / compiling made a big difference. They arent big on storage but we looked at the price difference compared to 10k-15k and sas drives.. these were a lot cheaper overall. We add one as the OS drive and a big 320/500GB secondary. Plus its a lot easier than messing with Raid 0 (and less risk of a drive crash).
 
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