Which hard drive for OS

Rodders179 · 10 May 2010 at 19:17

I have 2 seagate hard drive 7200.12 250gb and 500gb and a wd blue 500gb Currently i am using the wd blue with 287gb of data including OS

Can anyone help me by telling me what is the fastest set up

My current system is

Win 7 64-bit, i7 860, DDR3 6GB Dual,
NVIDIA GeForce 310 512 MB DDR2, Dell 054KM3 H57

Thank you in advance

Rodders

icedbullet · 10 May 2010 at 20:35

Well I'm no expert but I would partition the WD blue to 100GB for OS (if that is enough for you) and the rest for storage. I have read that by partitioning the drive with a smaller portion for the OS it will be a bit nippier.

If you could afford it I would suggest you invest in a dedicated OS drive for performance (the rest of your system seems good to me, just the HDDs letting it down a bit) such as a Samsung F3 or an ssd (I currently have the intel x25-M 80GB on order). I'm currently using a 1TB samsung F3 as my os disk (400GB:600GB partition) and it is very quick.

Rodders179 · 10 May 2010 at 23:36

Thank you for the reply

Would i notice any difference in say having the 250gb seagate just for OS and either the wd or seagate to store all my data and games?

How does raid 0 configs work? Do the drives have to be the same size? Thinking wd blue for OS and the 2 seagate in raid 0?

Sorry if these questions are really basic but any advice would be really appreciated

Rodders

icedbullet · 11 May 2010 at 09:56

In my personal experience having your OS on a separate drive is better but only if that HDD has better specs then your others. I'm not sure that 250GB seagate is better (as the 250GB only has a 8MB cache as far as I can tell).

Someone will correct me if I'm wrong but for RAID0 you need identical HDDs.

smee · 11 May 2010 at 10:49

enable raid on your motherboard this will give you a controller which will allow you to set up raid. ( Check your manual )

With the raid controller your choose which HD's you want to use, they will be the default to the smallest size so a 250 and a 500 will default to 2 x 250 it will ignore the extra space so best to use same sized drives.

Raid 0 will give you the fastest and best for system, application, games. stick your storage on seperate drive. Some people only put system on raid but depends on space.

With Raid your double the Input/Output( I/O ) speed of the drives. Once you raid you wont want to go back. ( remember to backup information you dont want to lose, raid 0 doesn't have redundancy)

have fun

linktoinsanity · 11 May 2010 at 18:56

Use the 500GB Seagate 7200.12 as your main drive of the three you mention as it's a newer faster drive then the WD Caviar Blue and has more cache then it's 250GB brother so will perform faster all round. Don't bother with RAID0 in your situation unless you want to pick up a second 500GB Seagate 7200.12 as you'll just lose the space.

Rodders179 · 12 May 2010 at 00:16

Thanks for all the advice.

i think i will have my seagate 500gb as my os with my seagate 250gb as data and games.

WD blue as a back up with OS so if the seagate breaks i can plug in and play