HDD setup proposal, help please!

[Bouncer]

Ok, here's what i'm planning:

4 HDDs, nothing in any RAID formation.

HDD1: 160GB Seagate 7200.10 - for OS and ALL Applications; Maya, CS3, Vid Editing and Games

HDD2: 320GB Seagate 7200.10 - Slave drive for apps when working, so this will be my maya scenes, DV source files, photoshop projects etc

HDD3: 500GB Seagate 7200.10 - For all files, movies, music, files and more files.

HDD4: 500GB Seagate 7200.10 - Overflow for files/music/movies and sort of a backup drive for important files

External Drive: 500GB - for backup.

My question is, does this look ok for my needs - i'm on a sort of budget though i'm happy to spend on quality drives/bigger drives if needed.

Would i benefit from raptors for the OS/Slave? I have heard about the noise, and noisey computers bug me.

I think a 320GB drive would be enough for the slave, but the price difference isn't much (but enough tbh) upto 500GB, though how often will i use 500GB of space on a project!?

Is the Seagate drive a 'good' one - i know theres no such thing as a 'bad' one really, but i've never used seagates. Samsungs are well reviewed, but i'm confused by the spinpoint T and the spinpoint S models

 

[xen_]

Seagates make very good drives, I have 3 in my current PC 2 of them are a few years old. Drives like raptors do make things faster, but imo aren't really worth it for the money unless you have some special use where you really need the extra speed, the noise would annoy me too from what I've read about them.

Maybe you could replace the external one and the 320gb one for 2 internal 500gb ones and run them in raid 1. In raid one it keeps a copy of everything on each drive, so any of your important project work will be backed up automatically and if either drive breaks you will have everything, this should possibly improve read spead too. This could probably be cheaper? Certainly wouldn't be much more expensive anyway.

To give better performance too, if your os and apps are going to be on hdd1 then disable virtual memory on that drive and put in onto one of the other drives.

 

[Bouncer]

cheers for the virtual memory thing. interesting. I will remember that.

I already have the external drive from a couple of years ago so thats i'm not getting another, i wonder about 2x250GB in RAID 1 for the slave. It shows up as one 500GB drive, but only holds 250GB is that right? I still don't really under stand RAID, i do know though that RAID 0 is not a good idea for crucial data.

 

[xen_]

2x250gb drives in raid 1 will only be 250gb, and it would show up in windows as 250gb. If you did that in raid 0 however it would show up as a 500gb drive, but this isn't a good idea if you have important work on it as it effectively doubles the chance of loosing that data.

This wikipedia article should help you understand raid a bit more, especially the bit under "standard levels".

 

[Bouncer]

i'll leave RAID i think.

I think i'll go for the 320GB as my slave.

Anybody know the difference between the samsung spinpoint S and T models?? :S