Gaming cases - why do you need so many hard drives ?

[steveinspain]

Just been looking at cases, and the Antec 900 ultimate gaming case has space for 6 hard drives - why do you need so many - I am guessing a raid set up might give you better speed - am I on the right tracks ?

 

[mishima]

Well if you are wanting a lots of room, so you can fit in big heatsinks with plenty of clearance this means you are going to need a big case. Theres going to be space free, my Antec 1200 has space for 9 HDD's!!

It also gives you the option of fitting raptors for fast bootup!

 

[EvilOne]

I use my Antec 900 to space out my hard drivres, dont like them being right next to each other as i think they will overheat

I have 2 drives atm (well 3 but 1 doesnt work lol), plan on getting another one soon.

 

[Greebo]

Plus people keep adding. My old pc started off with one hard drive. Then I added two raptors in raid for the operating systems. Then I ran out of storage space and added a 250Gb drive. The following year that was full so added another 500Gb drive.

No point me selling the old drives off so they may as well stay in there. Thats 5 hard drives in my rig now totalling 982Gb of space. I may soon have to add yet another one but I think I might then retire the first 160Gb hard drive.

You always think when you buy/build a new pc that the hard drive you buy is massive but as time goes by, you find that it isn't.

 

[J.B]

I use my Antec 900 to space out my hard drivres, dont like them being right next to each other as i think they will overheat

What he said. I have 3 in a RAID 5, its actually not that much space, especially if you have a beast of a graphics card which will just about void one of those spaces.

 

[fobose]

Well if your like me and prefer to run drives in RAID 1 then thats going to eat up a lot of those spaces. My PC has many uses, I built it for gaming, but I use it for file storage, download box, music/surfing and soon to be TV if I can get a frigg'n decent TV card

TV recordings will soon fill up my hard drives

 

[steveinspain]

I see now - I had wondered if gaming itself was a better experience with lots of hard drives - I also thought there was some easily reached limit on how many hard drives you could connect to a pc (yes, I am an old fogey, who grew up before calculators were invented..!)
So, if I build me a new pc, then install 2 or more hard drives, how easy is it to set up a raid 1 (mirror) or raid 3 (I think that is a mixture of raid 1 and raid 0, so speed and a copy of all data) - do all HD's need to be the same - I have 2 spinpoint 1tb and a 750 spinpoint currently in external caddies..
My mobo has built in raid support (Asus P5QL pro) but I have no knowledge of BIOS etc - is it easy to do ?

 

[J.B]

RAID is pretty easy on a built in controller, just check your mobo manual, normally towards the back somewhere. The drives work best when they are identical but dont have to be, but they will step down to meet the performace of the lower drive.

Raid 1 is mirrored like you say, Raid 0 is striped where you are most likely to see a performance increase but is risky as if one drives fails thats your whole raid gone.

RAID 0+1 is pretty good as it is a mirrored raid 0, it needs 4 drives though. You have your first 2 which are striped and the second 2 are an exact copy.

Personally I like RAID 5, which needs a minimum of 3 drives. It stripes across all 3 but also stores information about what's on one drive on another drive. It can get a bit complicated to explain but basicly in 5 if one disk fails, a replacement disk can be put in and it is rebuilt.

 

[Werewolf]

Lots of hard drive bays + lots of space for bits

It allows you some extra space for cabling, to spread the drives out (handy if you're using hot drives), space for extra drives if you're doing raid or just want to add a new drive.

I've had 3-4 drives in all my personaly machines for the past 5 years or so, generally because I keep the older (slightly smaller) ones as spares, and like to have at least 3 drives (one as the boot, games, and documents, one as music/games/video, and one as spare / backup drive).

 

[Craig321]

Just been looking at cases, and the Antec 900 ultimate gaming case has space for 6 hard drives - why do you need so many - I am guessing a raid set up might give you better speed - am I on the right tracks ?

RAID for operating system (this can be 2 or more hard drives)
A drive for storage
A drive for backup
A drive for game/program installs
Maybe another drive for more storage
Maybe another drive for more backups

etc.

Also as suggested above, space to run cables and a good amount of space between each hard drive to keep them nice and cool.

 

[bledd]

i use 1 or 2 max (2 if in raid0), and an external backup drive

can't stand hard drive noise (rest of my pc is pretty quiet) so the less the better