Optimum HD setup for gaming PC

Gregster6 · 2 Oct 2007 at 14:22

I notice that folks use some exotic looking setups with their hard disks. RAID, WD Raptor, separate hard disk for O/S and data etc.

I have 4 questions that I'd be keen to get some expert input on.

1. What is the optimum hard disk arrangement for a high-end purely gaming PC?...all its ever going to have on it is Vista 64-bit (plus minimum utilities e.g. a/virus) and 1 or two games...all its ever going to be used for is playing games

2. What would the the benefit of this set-up (over say a single, big SATA II drive)?

3. Would the difference be significant / noticable?

4. Are there any unpleasant consequences of such a setup (noise, heat, reliability)?...forget additional cost (within reason)...that's a given!

Thanks

thefishdude · 2 Oct 2007 at 14:56

well the most popular and very easy way to di is to have the operating system on a seperate drive to the rest of yoru pc so that if you you need to reinstall windows you can format the hdd and not lose everything else rthats on there especially if you storing files aswell.

me personaly i have 1 disk for os 1disk for games and 1 large disk for general storage.

you can alsouse raid arrays to increase performance liinking the hdds together. never done that myself but lots do can get some good speed increases or security increase depending on how you set them up.

Gregster6 · 2 Oct 2007 at 16:52

Is that a practicality / convenience thing or a performance thing?

I'm more interested in the latter.

Cheers

thefishdude · 2 Oct 2007 at 17:14

seperate drives is a practical thing how ever it can also be a performance thing getting large maybe slower drive to store files on and faster smaller drive like i did with raptors for os and games.

if you go the raid route that can deffitnaly be a performance thing

and a lot of people do it

Rroff · 2 Oct 2007 at 18:08

I usually go for a single drive for the OS (saves having to dig for RAID drivers, etc.) (tho 4x RAID0 on a 680i board boots windows like you wouldn't believe - about 3 seconds from windows logo to into the desktop fully loaded compared to about 30 seconds when using just a single drive)

Then I usually put 2x cheap 80gig in RAID0 for my games and a single larger disc for data.

badbob · 2 Oct 2007 at 18:10

I use a OS drive, and another drive for games. If case cooling is sufficient then number of hard drives won't make much difference, got 5 hard drives in this rig.