What is an ideal Hard Drive setup?

[IronMentality]

I want to have a fast 10,000 RPM Hard Drive for the new gaming rig I will be building come end of January 2005. (NVidia nForce4 Chipset is finally coming, woot).

I'll just probably get one Raptor 74GB for now (or possibly the 16MB Cache Maxtor, supposively that's just as fast as the Raptor with much more storage space) but I only have music, text files, and games on my PC and don't store videos so I'm still wavering on which one to get.

Myquestion comes down to about RAID and certain RAID numbers being hooked into the HD or w/e that boost performance without having two hard drives.

Thanks for any help, appreciate it.

[spyder003]

Myquestion comes down to about RAID and certain RAID numbers being hooked into the HD or w/e that boost performance without having two hard drives.

You must have more than one drive to run a RAID setup. RAID = Redundant Array of Independant (or Inexpensive) Disks. Read more about RAID here (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html). Unless you're doing some heavy graphics/audio/video work, RAID 0 may not be worth it.


Here (http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=117508) is a similiar thread about RAID.

[Karnevil9]

I'll assume that 10,000 rpm HD is a SATA drive. I think that is probably your best bet for speed. I don't know the specs for the 16MB cache Maxtor, but depending on benchmark test results, and you can do a google search to find them, that may also be a promising possiblity. I don't think the raid array will help you much more than the SATA. The size of the drive is more aimed at use then at speed. If you do a lot of video work or have a lot of files, music or otherwise, you need a large capacity drive.

If you are looking at the speed to spice up a gaming rig have the moderator move this post to the gaming and benchmark section of the forums. That's what those guys do.

[Naja]

Maxtor Diamond 10 Specs (http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/menuitem.ba88f6d7cf664718376049b291346068/?channelpath=/en_us/Products/ATA%20Hard%20Drives/Desktop/DiamondMax%2010&productview=Specifications)

Check the other tabs for more info..........

[mrmister1]

As spyder said you need at least two disks to run RAID. The RAID used to boost performance is RAID 0 or striping. But it's up to you whether you want to spend the extra money or not.

[WhatsThisBoxFor?]

Also, it is worth considering that RAID 0 does not provide that much performance increase, and it doubles the chance of all the data failing. I have also heard of a RAID controller going, and corrupting the hard drives as it died.

[shadowbreaker513]

As for the Maxtor, the only drives it comes in behind in tests is the 10,000 rpm raptor drives (excluding those special purpose expensive 15000rpm drives), and it has more space than 4 of the 74gb raptors, so personally, I would go with 2 of the maxtors in a raid 0

[jimmyrules712]

ive seen some people say doign a raid array on a desktop wont speed much up and so it may not be worth the trouble. I dont know this from my experience (never tried raid) so it may be worth further research.

The maxtor diamond backdoes not run at 10,000 rpm, it still does 7200, it just has that 16mb cache.

I've never tried either drive, so im not sure which is faster, rumors seem to say the raptor still is, but if so it may only be marginably.

At Anand tech in their high end gaming system they used both drives, with this as their reasoning.
"but we have paired the fastest SATA hard drive available - the Western Digital Raptor - with a fast, but spacious, Maxtor DiamondMax 10 (a.k.a. Maxline-III) drive."

SO whateveru wanna take form that i dunno, i did a search on google looking for comparisons and i found pretty much nothing that looked helpful.

[shadowbreaker513]

nobody ever said the maxtors were 10000rpm

[jimmyrules712]

nobody ever said the maxtors were 10000rpm

I want to have a fast 10,000 RPM Hard Drive for the new gaming rig I will be building come end of January 2005.......I'll just probably get one Raptor 74GB for now (or possibly the 16MB Cache Maxtor, supposively that's just as fast as the Raptor with much more storage space)

that statement impies that he thinks the maxtor is 10k rpm like the raptor, i was clearing that up incase he really did think that, thank you very much.

[shadowbreaker513]

Oh, sorry.

[Uber_Gamer]

One way to speed up performance of your hard drive is to partition it in an intelligent way. This also benefits you by keeping your computer more organized. A hard drive reads information faster when it is at the edge of the hard disc. When you put information on the hard drive it starts by writing it to the outside edge and as more space is needed, gradually moving towards the center of the drive. There can be as much as a 40% speed difference between the edge and center of the drive. Thus you want to partition your hard drive so that your paging file and operating system files are on the edge, and more useless stuff such as documents and downloads are on the inside. I partition my 120 Gb Hard Drive like this:
Paging File C: 2 gigs
Windows D: 10 gigs
Applications E: 10 gigs
Games F: 50 gigs
Files: 30 gigs
Downloads (Before I know they're virus-free and not junk) G: 10 gigs