System Drive advice

NaomiRE

NaomiRE

NaomiRE

Associate
Joined
17 Dec 2008
Posts
36
So I find myself with a choice and quite frankly I don't know enough to feel I know what I'm choosing between.

I've been offered the following Velociraptor system drive options with RAID 0 - so which is the best route to go?

500GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM (2 x 250GB)
1.0 TB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM (2 x 500GB)
2.0 TB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM (2 x 1.0 TB)
256GB Solid State Drive (2 x 128GB)



Does size matter, (heh no jokes please boys :D ), or does the seemingly smaller SSD that comes in at the most expensive, (256GB SSD), mean better performance? Would the larger drives mean slower performance as it fills, more heat, more to go wrong? I'm clueless. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

These are the only options available to me in the situation I'm in right now, so as much as I appreciate recommendations of other routes to go, my hands are kinda tied. I also don't have any more information than that so I'm really sorry if its needed!

Are there certain criteria I should look at when trying to make the choice? Gaming, design, graphics programmes are pretty much the staple of what the machine will go through, as well as things like photo storage/editing, maybe whacking in the odd dvd etc...help! :D
 
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all the standard HDD's you have there will perform the same as long as they are the same brand and just different capacities. raid 0 will be enough performance for games and standard home usage. all you have to consider is how much storage room you're going to need. I imagine unless you're going to have lots of films etc on the drives the 1tb option should be more than plenty
 
Cool thanks for the reply - I've been kinda staring at the list for a long time and calling myself all kinds of fool because tbh, none of it means much to me. I looked at the size and thought okay 1tb would be awesome...but wait.. why is the smaller SSD so over the top expensive lol. I know that a more expensive drive doesn't neccessarily mean it will suit ME better so I needed to get me some advice lol.

As far as I know all in the list are Velociraptors, noones told me any different anyway lol.

Storage wise my machines normally end up with games, pictures, music, screenshots by the trillion lol, (probably the largest percentage of files are of screenshots and photoshop files which normally end up in triplicate as I will save a PSD, JPG and a PNG file of each file), and maybe the odd film but rarely anything to take notice in. 1Tb is way more than enough in size for me, in fact the 500GB is probably still more than adequate, I was just more confused about performance between those three and the hugely more expensive 256GB SSD.

I'd still love to hear as many views as possible, I know how much some people can disagree round these parts lol!
 
Of the Raid options you list:
2.0 TB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM (2 x 1.0 TB) is the best.

But I'd just use the drives normally, no raid. For home use the added risk of catastrophic failure is not worth the minuscule boost of speed in a limited set of situations.
 
If I went with a single drive config the options would be:

250GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM
500GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM
1.0 TB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM
300GB SATA 3.0Gb/s 10K RPM Velociraptor
128GB Solid State Drive (again a lot more expensive).

How much higher is the risk of major failure by going the RAID 0 route? And just how minuscule is the boost in speed? I've only ever really heard that RAID is the way to go if you get the choice and that the boosts are far from minuscule...does the risk of failure really outweight the performance boost?

If I stuck with a single drive config would the extra in RPM on the 300gb SATA be worth considering over the slightly slower larger 1tb drive? How much difference does that extra speed make?

Sorry, this post has opened up a whole host of other questions now lol!
 
i have never had a hdd fail on me ever. that doesnt mean it doesnt happen, but it is still a risk even if minor. the real question is if there data you cannot lose then it is good to back it up, maybe on usb sitck or a dvd. depends how much data is critical. if data is games and your ipod it isnt really critical and can be reinstalled if such a failure ever occured.
 
NaomiRE said:
If I went with a single drive config the options would be:

250GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM
500GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM
1.0 TB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM
300GB SATA 3.0Gb/s 10K RPM Velociraptor
128GB Solid State Drive (again a lot more expensive).

How much higher is the risk of major failure by going the RAID 0 route? And just how minuscule is the boost in speed? I've only ever really heard that RAID is the way to go if you get the choice and that the boosts are far from minuscule...does the risk of failure really outweight the performance boost?

If I stuck with a single drive config would the extra in RPM on the 300gb SATA be worth considering over the slightly slower larger 1tb drive? How much difference does that extra speed make?

Sorry, this post has opened up a whole host of other questions now lol!
Click to expand...

You want a mixture - speed for the OS and perhaps your games files to speed up loading, and capacity for storage of vids and backups. You can take a risk on increased possibility of a RAID0 failure _provided_ you have a good backup strategy.

That's why folk often RAID0 a couple of small drives for OS/Games, and have an extra TB size drive for the other stuff. You can substitute the RAID0 for a single Velociraptor if you like, you lose a bit on transfer rate but gain on reduced access time (fairly important for the OS partition). You can go with a WD 1TB Green for the storage drive as it's unstressed and it's a good compromise.

Not enough real-world info out there on SSDs yet, they're too new, but they should be much better for OS/Games.
 
well if you're not dead set on raid0 you could always get 2x500gb and stick them in raid1, this way you have one 500gb drive for storage etc (you said this was plenty) and the other 500gb would act as a mirror so if either drive fails you have a complete back-up and your pc runs without even a hiccup. you replace the dead drive and build raid1 again and you have the same situation with no loss of any file and no pc downtime reinstalling your OS, just setting up the raid1 again which wouldn't take long at all.
 
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