What and which drives

Earlstreetblue

Earlstreetblue

Earlstreetblue

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Joined
19 Nov 2006
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Location
Barton Upon Humber/Whitby/Scarborough
I am pondering which and what drives I need. SATA/RAID or a combo.

At the moment I have:

Basic Rig spec:
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Coolermaster Centrurian Case
Enermax Liberty 500W PS
Asus P5B D/Wifi
C2D E6600
Zalman 9500LED
1 x 1Gb VS Corsair 667 DDR2
1 x 200Gb Maxtor 6B200M0 SATA drive (1 partition)
I am running XP Pro+SP2
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I intend to use a fair amount of space for storage (HD video,music etc). I also do a fair bit of video editing/encoding.

Should I be looking at (A) single SATA drives, haveing say a Raptor solely for the OS and seperate drive(s) for the data. Or (B) should I be looking at the RAID options. I seem to be leaning towards option (A) at the moment. But hopefully someone here, more knowledgable than myself will point me in the right direction.

Drive sizes, I am looking at are upto 400Gb SATA
So which drives would you recomend and why?
What partiton(s) would be best and why?

TIA
 
When you say a fair amount of space how much are we talking about? 500Gb, 1Tb, 2Tb?

Personally I don't really see the point in Raptors at the moment, they're not that much quicker than the best 7200rpm drives but still have a price premium.

It's difficult to give a decent recommendation without knowing some more detail (space requirements, budget etc) but here's an idea:

2*320Gb Seagate 7200.10 in RAID0 - ~600Gb space
C: 100Gb Max - OS + all apps
D: 500Gb - Working space, target for video encoding etc

320Gb Seagate 7200.10
E: 300Gb - Media, completed video edits etc

Existing 200Gb Maxtor
?: 190Gb - move this to an external enclosure for backups


There's nothing to stop you having a bigger E: or more disks for storage but I'd keep these as single drives or look into a RAID5 array if you've got the budget (£200 minimum for a decent controller).
 
When you say a fair amount of space how much are we talking about? 500Gb, 1Tb, 2Tb?
Click to expand...

How wide is the universe? I would say at the moment, short term, I would hazard a guess at somewhere between 500Gb to 1Tb. Mainly untill the price of HD-DVD/Blue Ray drives come down a notch or two.

I only mention Rapters because of what others have said, so I'm not overly bothered on that score. But fairly fast drives would be pretty high up in my list of priorities. I also take it, at the moment, large drives don't necessarily mean fast drives, so maybe I'm looking towards largish/fast drives.

t's difficult to give a decent recommendation without knowing some more detail (space requirements, budget etc)
Click to expand...

Well again, as above at the moment I have nearly filled the 200Gb drive mostly with video, so I suppose I ought to be looking like I said between 500Gb--> 1Tb for the time being. As for money, well I don't have a lot to spend, maybe £300 or so.

One other thing I forgot to mention, is that I do have a Shuttle hanging around at the moment not doing too much (Vista testing) that has 200Gb of disc space. I suppose I could use that as some form of backup.

I take it Seagates are the "in" drives at the moment.
 
Big can mean fast - the Seagates are quick because they pack a lot of data onto each platter. They're actually quicker than the 36Gb Raptors.

The layout I gave earlier would give you 900Gb internally for about £170 ex vat so no real worries about space or price. RAID0 plus single storage drives will give you a fast disk for the encoding/editing and scalable storage for completed projects. As you fill one storage drive you can add another easily (until you run out of SATA ports).

If you're thinking about RAID0 you also need to think about backups although if you only use it for working space it might not be that important. DVD-R might be all you need or you might want to think about more or bigger external drives.

Apologies if this sounds kind of rambling but I'd rather give you options than try and tell you what to do.
 
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