Upgrade ram or hdd for speed increase

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guitarguy6

[H]ard|Gawd
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Oct 29, 2007
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Hey guys, I have a couple extra $$$ to spend and was wondering which upgrade would net me a slight performance increase. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit and use my pc for Gaming, HD video, and audio recording. I have 6gb's of ddr-3 and have 2 X 160gb seagate sata in raid 0. Should I get another 6gb's of ram or grab two WD 500gb black for a raid 0 array?
 
Grab two 500GB HDDs for the RAID 0 array, but buy either the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 or the Samsung SpinPoint F3 drives.

They use a single-platter design that make them faster than even the 640GB/1TB WD Black drives.
 
tiraides said:
Grab two 500GB HDDs for the RAID 0 array, but buy either the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 or the Samsung SpinPoint F3 drives.
Click to expand...
+1. If I remember right, I don't think WD recommends the Black drives for RAID 0. I could be mistaken, tho.
 
Really? I thought that WD Black were supposed to be crazy fast compared to other 7200rpm hdd's?
 
guitarguy6 said:
Really? I thought that WD Black were supposed to be crazy fast compared to other 7200rpm hdd's?
Click to expand...

They use to be. It's only very recently that info and results of the new single platter 500GB drives have come out.
 
I was also looking into short stroking the hdd's. Would I seperate the partition to 25% of 500GB or 25% of 1TB since it's raid 0.
 
That depends... do you want 125GB OS partition or 250GB? lol. Performance difference is negligible at those percentages, IMO.
 
Would I have to keep it under %20 to make a difference? Also I got one of the 500gb 7200.12 Seagates and it doesn't seem to great. I might try Raid 0 with them.

500gb 7200.12 ---> Min 65mb/s Max 123.3mb/s AVG 99.8mb/s Burst 135.6mb/s access 14.4ms

WD6400AAKS ---> Min 55.1mb/s Max 108.8mb/s AVG 90.2mb/s Burst 146.3mb/s access 11.9ms

Seagate 160gb RAID 0 ---> AVG Read 111.3 Random Access 17.6ms
 
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