Decisions, decisions...

Gamezy

Gamezy

Gamezy

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Joined
13 Jan 2005
Posts
77
I'm trying to make a decision as to what I should do with my current HDD setup. I've got 2x 80gb (SATA I), a 200gb(PATA), and a 160gb(PATA) (definately all seagate, possibly 7200.8 I think...can't remember and am lazy).

I'm looking at getting a bit more in the way of space and performance. Average read speeds of both 80gb drives is 45mb/s (about 4 years old), I was considering raiding these for windows (RAID 1, the drives are old), but am not sure if this will improve the read speed much, if at all. I'm looking at getting one of the following options:

WD Raptor 150gb
2x Seagate 320gb 7200.10 (RAID 0)
Seagate 500gb 7200.10

Obviously I'd like to use SATA II as the interface, but I'm not really sure what would give me the best gaming performance, or even if I should just raid my two 80gbs, and get the 500gb (or 400gb to save money!) as storage.

Any advice, help. etc would be great as I'm in quite a pickle! :confused:
 
RAID1 won't give you any improvement on read speed in general and I've also found that the write speeds can be pretty poor - I was only getting 20-30Mb/s from a pair of T7K250s on an NVidia controller.

150Gb Raptor:
Expensive, small but quick. By far the lowest seek times and a pretty quick sustained transfer rate so general use will feel pretty quick.

2X320Gb Seagate:
Same price as the Raptor but 4 times the capacity. In RAID0 these will give you pretty much the best transfer rates you can get but seek times are far less than the Raptor. If you're shifting big files (>4Mb or so) about this is the way to go. RAID0 of course has disadvantages

500Gb Seagate:
This is the cheaper option but is slower than both the others, although still quicker than the drives you have.


My choice from the three would be the 2x320Gb drives in RAID0 and then use you're existing disks for backups.
 
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