Hard Drive Upgrade...

Soul Rider · 1 May 2006 at 14:06

I currently have 2 IDE drive's, a Samsung Spinpoint 200GB and a Maxtor 120GB.

I have the Asrock Dual Sata board, which has 2 IDE slots, 2 Sata 1 slots, and 1 SATAII slot.

I will be looking to keep my Samsung drive, but am looking for 2 Sata drives to run in a RAID0 config as my main windows drive, with the Samsung holding other stuff, and the Maxtor as my back-up drive containing the Images I will be creating.

The question is What are the current quality drives in the Sata market? I have never had SATA drives before, only IDE and SCSI. I'm not looking for particuarly big drives, as I want to keep the chance of total failure low, and will soon get a SATAII drive to replace the Samsung.

I am looking for about 40-60Gig per SATA drive, largest cache possible and as quiet as possible.

Please advise.

SiriusB · 1 May 2006 at 14:53

If you want reliability then Hitachi is the way to go. However Seagate and Samsung aren't to be sniffed at. Western Digital do the Raptors, 36GB, 74GB and 150GB but while these are insanely fast drives - they dont come cheap.

I'm not sure why you want to RAID0 your system drive because realistically there isn't THAT much improvement to warrant spending twice as much and run twice as much risk of failure.

SiriusB

Soul Rider · 1 May 2006 at 14:58

There may not be that much improvement, but there will be an improvement. Typically I find most of my slowing PC problems relate to the windows partition on my PC, and all the Reg Cleaning, Spyware and Anti-Virus checking can't stop the gradual slow down of the main drive. The speed improvement will just mean less of a slow down, so longer between rebuilds. Any way, if one drive does fail, i can either replace it, or just use the single drive, either way there is still a worthwhile performance increase over my ATA133 drives.

SiriusB · 1 May 2006 at 15:01

Have you tried moving your pagefile to a different HDD? This can do a lot to increase performance of your system.

However its your choice - I just know I wouldn't bother with the hassle for a tiny improvement

SiriusB

Soul Rider · 2 May 2006 at 15:09

SiriusB said:
Have you tried moving your pagefile to a different HDD? This can do a lot to increase performance of your system.

However its your choice - I just know I wouldn't bother with the hassle for a tiny improvement

SiriusB

I keep my pagefile on the second hard-drive, I know this does wonders for the performance.

The way I see it, SATA drives are really going down in price and soon will be selling more than IDE drives. Once this happens, IDE's will start going up in price, as the demand for them falls, so I might as well start my upgrade to SATA now.

Thanks for the help BTW.