Raptor/Raid storage dilema

[keylion]

Hi all,

Soon I am going to be building my new PC. At the moment I have one of the original 36GB 8MB cache WD Raptors. What would you experienced ones think to the following:

1) Keep the Raptor for my OS and buy a 500GB drive for storage.

2) Buy 2x 160GB drives and have them in a Raid 0 configuration. I have an 400GB external drive that I can use for backup's and other storage needs.

Would I get much of a perfomance increase with option 2?

If option 2 looks the best, what drives dhould I get - just the cheapest?

Thanks for looking.

Regards,

CS

 

[keylion]

Thanks for all your replies so far. Not sure what to do yet though. One other issue in staying with my existing Raptor is that 36GB is a little bit small these days. Once you've got everything installed, a couple of large files on your desktop and you're out of room!

Like the idea of finding another matching Raptor (will be about £45 by the look of it) but not sure about two 3 year old drives as my main disk, although I get the impression that they are very reliable.

Going to wait until next week (and the Intel price cuts!) before I order the rest of my system so I will do some more research in the meantime.

Any other comments are also welcome.

Thank you all.

CS

 

[keylion]

I benchmarked 36G raptors vs 300gb drives in windows and IIRC the 300gb whipped the raptors, even in RAID vs RAID.

Thanks for that, it is very interesting. I've been doing a lot of reaserch on the best SATA drives to buy recently (in preparation for going RAID 0) and in several reviews/benchmarks i've got the impression that the latest generation 'standard' hard drives are not that far away and, in certain circumstances, even beat raptors. Taking this into consideration, and that my raptor is an original three year old model, i've decided to go for just one Segate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB drive for now to replace my original raptor. I didn't want to go straight to RAID 0 now as I though that the difference between my raptor and the new drive may be muddied by the difference between my old rig and new one. Maybe in a few months I will add another Seagate and go RAID 0, possibly along with Vista.

Regards,

CS