Too many hard disks?

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I'm thinking of having 3 x 1tb hard disks and 1 x 300 gb velociraptor in my new pc. To save money I might only get a 150gb velociraptor I'm not sure yet.

Anyway I want all this storage room as I download a ton of stuff and am a chronic hoarder. I also have about 800gb worth of media to back up.

What I'm concerned about is will all these hard disks make too much noise, I mean are they all accessed simultaneously and seen as a "single" hd or are they separate entities? I'm just thinking 4 hard disks all spinning around at once might get pretty darn nosiy!
 
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They'll only be seen as a single entity if you put them in a RAID array, which you may want to do if you plan to make it your backup location.

Otherwise, you'll only be accessing them as and when a file is needed, so they should be perfectly bearable.
 
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if they are set up in raid then they will be seen as one hard drive and depending on the type of RAID used. check out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks

scroll down tells u all types of RAID. nosie u can deal with using hard drive mountings that reduce the noise they can trafer to the case and obviously the way u set them to be accessed will affect when they r spinnign up etc.

what you should be more concerned about is your power supply being large enough to run so many discs as well as pc components once they r under stress like using full cpu and ram in a stress test or application as well as power to graphics cards etc and this will egt more demanding with overclocking as i'm sure u know.

another issue is heat, Hard drives are dman warm, mine u cna feel heat off so you need fans at the hard drive bay and fans getting that warm air out of your case. you could always back up externally etc, saves power and space in case...
 
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Thanks for the replies guys, I really appreciate it. I'm not that tech savvy so I have to rely on people to help me.

Noise was my major concern and if they're not accessed simulatenously it should be ok. I won't be using RAID.

Chrismcca I am getting a 1000 watt power supply as I need to power a gtx 295 too. I won't be overclocking anything.

I'll consider too an external hard disk I admit I hadn't thought of that.

THanks
 
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A 1000W PSU is massive overkill for your purposes. Hard drives draw maximum power as a reactive load when they're spinning up - given that most motherboard controllers don't support staggered spinup, I'd personally allow around 40W per drive, but even that's probably erring very much on the side of caution.

The quality of the PSU is more important than its headline power rating - in the past I've run five HDDs off of a 300W Seasonic with no problems, although admittedly with a modest integrated GFX chipset.

As far as noise is concerned, much depends on the case and the HDD mounting method - I'm presently running four Samsung F1s in an Antec P182, and although I can hear them, they're not particularly offensive. As long as you can keep them decoupled from the case and from each other (to avoid nasty "beating" harmonic effects) you should be OK, but check out silentpcreview.com for the last word on the subject. :)
 
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I have a total of 5 F1s plus 2 other discs in my case and yes they make a reasonable amount of noise, if you have a case with a closeable front that would make a difference, also use screws with rubber noise dampners if you can or some other sort of HDD isolation i.e. bungee if noise is that much of an issue
 
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why are you going for the velociraptor? I'm assuming (and probably wrongly) that it will act as a boot drive? It does'nt make sense to me to buy 3 1TB drives and then a 300/150GB velociraptor.

If you're using a velociraptor as a boot drive on its own, if you don't mind sacrificing some room, you could get an SSD drive to act as a boot drive and raid the 3 other drives that you'll buy together, which i would'nt personally reccommend but that's me.

That way, you're OS will make a significant performance increase over the velociraptor
the cheapest velociraptor being £155, A single, good 64GB Apex SSD is around £30 more or get one of the 64GB Samsungs that a lot of us here have which currently cost around £135 which will also save you money and contribute significantly to overall system performance on a scale larger than that of the velociraptor.

If i were you, where space and system integrity is important, i'd scrap the 3 1tb drives in raid cos if the raid array ***ks up then you'll loose all of the data on the array if it is a raid 0 configuration unless you use different drives individually to store different information.

You'd probably be better off getting a single WD 2TB Caviar Green Drive(http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-263-WD&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1279) instead of 3 raided 1TB drives for puprposes of ensuring that the data is'nt lost due to Raid failure. The other benefit of that is that you will only be using 2 sata ports instead of 4, which means that you can always add drives at you're own descretion later on, however to get the maximum benefit then you would have to get 2 more 2TB drives or just not use Raid.
 
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I agree that a SSD would be better than a raptor but i disagree with getting a 2tb rather than 3 F1s. for one thats 1 less tb of space for the money.

As for the raid it depends what it is to be used for, if its just to store the thing you download (video files i assume) then raid 0 or 5 is unnecessary as the speed is not needed. depending on how much data you currently have and the rate that you download i would have 2 drives inside the case with an external as backup for this files you couldn`t replace
 
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If it's storage, I'd definitely go for the WD Green drives. Spin more slowly and far cooler than any other drive I've used, plus are near as damnit silent.

Also consider the drive power saving features of Windows :)
 
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for the money 3 sammys are better than a 2tb drive, plus a ssd is not such a good idea if they are constantly written on and erased , there life isnt that good, the velo raptors are good drives but very expensive
 
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for the money 3 sammys are better than a 2tb drive, plus a ssd is not such a good idea if they are constantly written on and erased , there life isnt that good, the velo raptors are good drives but very expensive

Most SSD's now will last years of everyday use, and offer a nice improvement in performance. SSD's are generally considered the most significant upgrade you can do on your computer too. http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

Another benefit of SSD's is there silent operation, which seems important to the user.

I don't know why everyones talking about raid, he's already stated hes not using it. He's far better off with three 1tb hard drives than one 2tb hard drive. The only real reason i can see to get one 2tb hard drive is for lower power consumption, though i'd imagine the difference is actually fairly minimal anyway.

To answer the OP the hard drives will only spin up when demanded. So if you have a program stored on one hard drive then thats the only hard drive you'll hear (with the exception of possibly the boot drive) when running that program.
 
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