New Harddrives - I Need YOUR opinion

buchtis

buchtis

buchtis

Soldato
Joined
23 Oct 2009
Posts
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Location
Derbyshire
Noon all,

Looking to buy 2 harddrives and put them in RAID 0 but there's one problem, i've never used/had a RAID set-up and i'm actually scared of setting it up as it looks complicated as hell. Watched a few tutorial videos where a guy said to press either Ctrl + H/I at boot to go into a set up screen which my mobo doesn't have.

Also, i'm looking at the following two harddrives:

Western Digital RE2 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (WD5000YS) [WD5000YS-01MPB1]

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-102-WD&groupid=1657&catid=1660&subcat=1664

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (ST3500418AS) [ST3500418AS]

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-206-SE&groupid=1657&catid=1660&subcat=1664

Which one of these two would be better/faster in a RADI set up? They both seem to be identical stat wise though the Barracuda does have a marginally faster read time of 0.2ms, is that worth the extra £3 though?

Will be used for gaming and video editing.

Many thanks! :)
 
buchtis said:
Watched a few tutorial videos where a guy said to press either Ctrl + H/I at boot to go into a set up screen which my mobo doesn't have.
Click to expand...
You won't see the prompt until you've set the SATA controller to RAID mode. (Don't do this ahead of time though, your existing Windows installation doesn't have the correct drivers loaded so will BSOD at boot)

Personally I wouldn't go with either of the drives you've linked to, the WD is pretty old technology now, certainly nowhere near as quick as current drives. The Seagate is OK but I'd pick the Samsung F3 in preference.
 
The speed advantage of raid with normal drives is getting less and less imo.

I'd go for a SSD drive and a 1tb drive for storage (and another for backup)
 
For pure standard HDD performance the sammy F4s are top dog in terms of seq read speed. You will sacrifice a little space in return though.
 
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