2x7200.10 250Gb or 1x7200.10 500GB

Sijo45 · 14 Feb 2007 at 23:39

My not so trusty Maxtor Diamondmax Plus10 300GB has started giving up the ghost (again, can't count how many of these things I've had!!), and decided to replace it rather than do a warranty fix, or atleast flog the warranty replacement.

Current hard drive of choice is a Seagate 7200.10, but not sure whether to go with 2x250GB 8MB caches or 1x500GB 16mb cache. It's about £5 more expensive for 2 drives. Use my pc for few games, but mostly non-taxing stuff like watching videos etc. Only major system hog is FSX. Is it worth going for a RAID? Rest of system is:

Athlon 64X2 4200+
1.5GB RAM
Geforce 7900GS 256MB
Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro SLI

Sooo annoying that it's dying now as only ordered a new case this morning! Double P&P to pay!

Incidentally, the problems I'm encountering are system freezes when accessing certain files on the disk. Tried system scheduled scandisk and system freezes at a given point, within Windows, it says it cannot complete and HD-Tach fails on the sequential read tests. Does anyone know of a decent (free) utility I can use to try and atleast locate the bad sectors?

Thanks

Stelly · 14 Feb 2007 at 23:51

One 500Gb 7200.10... well I think so anyway.... but I guess if you RAIDing then 2 drives should be good

Stelly

Borden · 15 Feb 2007 at 08:16

It depends on what you want them for. If you want them for speed then buy 2x250gb and RAID them. If you want it for storage then just get a single drive.

A single drive is definately the way to go for storage though

-Less noise
-Less heat
-Uses less sata ports on m/board so allows for future expansion
-More reliable

jbloggs · 15 Feb 2007 at 23:22

Sijo45:

If you do go the RAID0 route, and get 2 x 250GB 7200.10s, it would also be advisable to install a 3rd HDD to back up (essential) data on you RAID0 array that you don't want to loose, just incase the RAID array (for one reason or another) fails, which would more than lightly result in the loss of everything on the 2 x 250GB 7200.10s (RAID0 setup).

Sijo45 · 16 Feb 2007 at 08:51

Thanks Jbloggs. I'll bear it in mind. Still need to decide which way to go with these drives!

555BUK · 16 Feb 2007 at 15:00

I have 2x320GB 7200.10's and can comment as follows.

For General Windows use I have noticed little difference between RAID-0 and individual SATA drive configs. Benchmarks show a big improvement for RAID, but in the real world it did not make much difference.

For Gaming, BF2 and other "large" games do load approx 10% quicker with RAID.

For Video Encoding, two individual drives are vastly superior to a RAIDed pair. Reading source content from one physical drive and writing to the second is approximately 50% faster than reading and writing from the same array.

Overall, I think RAID is a waste of time. It is not that much faster in the real world and it doubles the risk of failure. I would actually go for 2xXXXGB hdd's and run them in a non-RAID config. I played with raid but 2 drives suit me better.

edited to say the 7200.10's are superb drives. Good choice.

naro · 16 Feb 2007 at 21:39

i would suggest that you get a 500gb drive.

and for your Max-torture drive, RMA it and sell it off to recoup some losses..

peetee · 17 Feb 2007 at 02:28

hate to thread hijack? maybes im just used to these 2x250 WD drives, but I got one of these 7200x100 500s and bugger me, its a bit noisy isnt it? loading noises etc, doesnt seem to be THAT fast either. Not very impressed, concidering demoting it to the storage drive now. Maybes my 250s were actually faster, they seem like they were.

PU7E · 17 Feb 2007 at 03:25

well the smaller the drives the faster the acsess times/loading times i prefer 2 smaller drives for gaming and a bigger one for storage thats why i have 2 74gb drives on raid there uber fast when loading

rpstewart · 17 Feb 2007 at 08:49

Smaller drives aren't necessarily faster. The only reason that the 74Gb Raptors (and their 36 & 150Gb siblings) are quick is that they employ a 10000rpm spindle speed rather than the usual 7200rpm and their platters are only about 2.5" in diameter rather than the normal 3". These factors combined give the drives a good sustained transfer rate and a very good average seek time.

The fact that they're smaller does not on its own reflect why they're faster - for example a 750Gb Seagate 7200.10 will be well over twice as fast as a 40Gb Hitachi 120GXP despite being almost 20 times larger.

Sijo45 · 18 Feb 2007 at 09:52

naro said:
i would suggest that you get a 500gb drive.

and for your Max-torture drive, RMA it and sell it off to recoup some losses..

From your comment, I take it I'm not the only one who has had trouble with Maxtor drives.... Let's just hope the 'quality' of their products doesn't rub off on Seagate now they own them...

peetee · 18 Feb 2007 at 13:17

Sijo45 said:
From your comment, I take it I'm not the only one who has had trouble with Maxtor drives.... Let's just hope the 'quality' of their products doesn't rub off on Seagate now they own them...

Iv just being saying how disappointed i am with my 7200.10, i had it next to my mates machine which has my old maxtor in it. Sounded quite sodding similar.
The 7200s being demoted to storage drive anyways, my WDs are way faster to be honest. and they dont make any noise.