Hard drive choices? RAID perhaps?

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
160,154
Hi all,

Need some more storage. Not that much, really, another 250Gb will do fine.

Currently got a Maxtor Maxline III 250Gb 8Mb Cache drive.

The way I see it, I have two choices:

a) Buy a WD 250Gb 300GB/S SATAII drive with 16Mb Cache
b) Buy another Maxline III 250Gb (Can you get these anymore?) and run it with my existing drive in RAID0.

Which would you chose, and why? Is there a better single drive solution for less than 50 quid than the WD 16Mb cache jobby?

I'm running a Gigabyte DS3 and I want low noise and performance - but don't we all. I mainly use my machine for gaming and browsing and don't often move enormous files around and I never do video editing.

Ta!
 
The AAKS drives from WD and the 7200.10's are the obvious choice

But if you want quiet and OK performance Samsung aren't bad.
 
[TW]Fox said:
b) Buy another Maxline III 250Gb (Can you get these anymore?) and run it with my existing drive in RAID0
Click to expand...

Seriously, I wouldn't bother with that option (unless you were just going to use it for your main windows drive), I've seen people accidentially knock out the sata cable from one of RAID drives, and hey presto, 2/3 hard drives worth of data lost (in my friends case, 400gb of Various videoes)

The problem with using RAID 0 for storing large ammounts of data is if one of the drives die or get knocked out of the RAID for whatever reason, thats it, good bye CSI/House Video collection. If you did want to go down the route of RAID, I'd advise RAID 5 (although this needs at least 3 disks(I Think)), if one falls out the RAID, it re-builds the lost drive by a redundancy check kept on the third drive.

I've got a single 500gb drive, with another on the way, I'll either keep this as an additional drive, or use RAID 0+1 (Mirror/Clone) incase either drive dies.

Hope this helps.
 
Yea, very helpful thanks. I'll go for a WD AAKS as my primary drive :)

Whats the difference between AAKS and KS? I can only find reputable reviews including the KS series drive. Seems good.
 
The KS is the older model, the AAKS is the current one. The data density on the AAKS is higher hence the sustained transfer rate is higher.
 
250Gb AAKS it is.

OcUK don't appear to have the 250Gb AAKS is listed. Is this drive readily available in 250Gb form?
 
I have a 250GB Samsung Spinpoint, 500GB Seagate 7200.10 and 320GB WD AAKS and I have to admit that the samsung is the quietest but not the fastest.
I don't know why people are regarding the Seagate 7200.10 with the pink glue as the quietest coz they're definetly not!
The WD 320GB AAKS is probabily the fastest I have but definately not the quietest!
 
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